Serial to USB on DirectTV D11-500

[BladeUtah]

This is my first posting to the forums. A few days ago, I purchased the Linux OEM. Prior to that, I used the Windows trial for a week, and was quite please with what it offered. (I really wanted to run a Linux trail, as I have many years experience with Unix/Linux platforms, but... no such offering).

On the Windows product, I was able to control my DirectTV STB using a serial->USB cable with a simple registry change to call a Perl script, "directv2.pl", which ironically, I found available for MythTV (Linux).

I've got my machine running fine with a single PVR-150, but I'm at loss to figure out integration of serial port control. I was hoping Frey Tech would offer *more* flexibility for configuring STB interfaces on Linux, but I can not see anything like the ExeTunerPlugin/registry options that they offer in their Windows product.

Does anyone have any experience tuning the DirectTV set top box using Sage/Linux? Preferrably by means of serial->USB rather than using IR? I haven't tried, but am confident I can get /dev/ttyS0 to control the STB as I did in Windows, however, the only tuning options I see are some odd port references in source setup, which I assume reference the IR device for the PVR-150. I didn't see anything that stood out in Sage.properties that would allow using a custom plugin. I appreciate any guidance anyone may offer.

Thanks!
BladeUtah
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P4 2.4Ghz 512Mb, Fedora 5 fully patched, 250 Gb/80Gb HDs, single PVR-150 (and hoping for 3 more of 'em...)