Galileo TriMix / IrDA

[William Perry]

I am looking at switching to Subsurface so that I can just keep a linux VM floating around to download dives from my Galileo (Trimix) instead of a Windows VM and the 'fabulous' SmarTrak software from ScubaPro.  I am running this Ubuntu 13.04 VM in Parallels 8 at the moment and am having issues getting this to download anything at all with a generic mcs7780 USB adapter.  I expect it is an issue with the low-level IR stack, but the IRDA documentation leaves a bit to be desired.

The irda0 driver gets loaded successfully and I have modified /etc/default/irda-utils to set
DEVICE=irda0
AUTOMATIC=true
DISCOVERY=true

And irattach gets launched successfully when I plug in the USB device, but it just spits out this:

Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: Starting device irda0
Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS): Broken pipe
Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: Stopping device irda0
Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: exiting …

And then dies.  'ifconfig -a' shows the irda0 adapter still, and lsusb is showing the correct chip manufacturer / identifying information:
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 9710:7780 MosChip Semiconductor MCS7780 4Mbps Fast IrDA Adapter

But I get no joy trying to import from Subsurface, or from a quick test program I wrote to talk directly to libdivecomputer.  This is actually the first time in 20 years of using and developing software on Linux that I have tried to get IrDA working.  Am I missing something very basic here?  I was able to download the dives into SmarTrak in windows so I don't think I have a hardware issue, but the adapter is ~6 years old and has had a few accidents, perhaps the windows drivers are a bit more forgiving?

-bill