Linux

Why are you trying to install a driver for a CH340? The driver is already built into the kernel. Just plug it in and it will work.

Please dont follow windows workflows.

If you run a random script with or without sudo, you can easily get malware or break your system.

A .c file is also not ran, it is a C source file and needs to be compiled

i.e. you are doing something completely wrong and followed some strange advice.

Instead,

1. Try if the USB cable is the only issue
2. Drivers are in the kernel, so you cannot just install them
3. Ask Linux Mint people how to do this, or Ubuntu or Debian people (the distros are related)

The driver should already be installed but there seems to be an issue with brltty registering the corresponding USB ID when they shouldn't. You can probably fix it by following this guide: https://koen.vervloesem.eu/blog/how-to-stop-brltty-from-claiming-your-usb-uart-interface-on-linux/ (or this one: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/670637)

Edit: Perhaps this has since been fixed in Mint 21 / Ubuntu 22.04.

*.c files are C source files, you can't run these directly. Run the makefile with sudo make or sudo make install (assuming you have make installed) to build (or build and install) the driver.

edit: Oops didn't read far enough into your post, you've already tried make. What error does it give you?

can't really tell much without knowing this package, but ./ is not what you're looking for. try just "make" or "make clean", as this is standard syntax for Makefiles. if you are wondering what happens, make looks for a file called "Makefile" in the current directory and executes whatever is inside. in your case it will most likely compile the .c file into an executable

Edit:

Scroll down about ¾ way down the sparkfun page that you linked, to the section that says "Linux" and follow those instructions

1. ~~Read the readme file, either by opening in a text editor or typing "nano readme.txt" (then Ctrl+x to exit)~~

2. ~~Type "make" and see if that works. If it complains, install what its complaining about~~

I did what abominable_panda suggested and it returned a "wait_queue_t" and a couple of pointer type errors. I'm not sure if that's something that could be fixed with installing something else, but I'm not at all familiar with troubleshooting on this OS yet. The troubleshooting part you mentioned is if it successfully installed but there are issues. It doesn't quite explain the initial installation part.

As for cmnybo's question, I'm trying to program a ESP32 module with the Arduino IDE. I've tried just plugging it in and hoping the driver would already be installed but lsusb doesn't show it on the results.

Have you setup a rules file for USB? You must have a udev rule setup that gives your user access to the hardware. It is trivial to create, but is one of those little headaches you learn as you go. Sparkfun and Adafruit should both have good tutorials if you search either of them for udev rules.

Mine for a ch340 is done like this:

$ cd  /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo nano 69-my-usb-serial-devices.rules
# ch340
SUBSYSTEM="USB", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="1a86", ATTR{idProduct}=="7523", MODE="0666"

I just told you to enter the terminal editor nano and enter a note that will help you remember that this is for the ch340 # ch340 followed by a line that sets the permissions for the device using a rule for which users have access to the device. I'm assigning the rule based on the vendor and product ID numbers. You can find these numbers by using the $ lsusb command. FYI, the $ is standard shorthand for command line as your standard user. This is opposed to # which is short for the root user at the command line.

Once you enter this line in nano, follow the instructions to save the file in nano :qw IIRC. The next time you plug in the device, the kernel should use this rule to set the permissions for the device to 0666 which means everyone can read write, but not execute stuff from the port; with execute would be 0777.

When you are trying to find info about a USB device the following may be helpful:

$ sudo dmesg | grep -F "USB device number" 

Note that the last line should be the most recently connected device. $ dmesg is the system-d boot log. Depending on how system-d is configured, you'll probably see timestamps on the left. The initial bootup devices will show up with a tightly grouped time stamp, while later connections will show a much larger number.

There have been some recent changes in Fedora that have broken a script I wrote to help me with all the various places where USB hardware is located and finding the right info. I'm trying to parse that script for the key elements. The first step is to find the location of the hardware. You are looking for something like /dev/bus/usb/003/003 or wherever the new device got mounted. This is only the start, because different parts of the device may be mounted in different locations. I'm not just talking about the CH340, but like, if you are doing microcontrollers stuff that gets more complicated like forth, micropython and circuit python where there will be more going on than just the serial port, or you need to know low level stuff. Once you know the specific port, you can use $ udevadm info --attribute-walk --path=$(udevadm info --query=path --name=/dev/bus/usb/003/003) # enter the port for the device in question.

In the past, my script used $ dmesg to retrieve the device location, then used $ lsusb -D *device location* to get the basic info. Then I went a layer deeper with the udevadm command to see everything related to the device. The command $ fdisk -l might also help with some STM32 type stuff that has a dfu bootloader and identifies as a USB drive when plugged in... At least, I think that was the reason I kept that option in my script, it has been awhile since I used one of those.

Edit: I can get the actual port location of a device now using $ lsusb -t -vv.