Bah.

So it looks like one thing I'm not going to be able to do with any sort of ease whatsoever, is figure out how to get the rowing machine monitor to talk to this computer.

The thing people are using to run virtual rowing machine races works through Chrome. I eventually found a rowing machine help forum page where I ran lsusb and was able to see that the computer had correctly identified what I'd plugged into it. Then I followed the first part of these instructions even though I don't entirely understand why to do that. That made it so I could fire up Chromium and homerace.nl and at least get the erg monitor to show up in the selection window. But at that point the interface got grumpy about something unknown and I had to stop because it's late and I probably don't have time tomorrow to mess around with this.

So I might wind up participating in an erg race using a rowing machine that's on campus in my office on Saturday morning.

We shall see.

Really, though, Concept2 has been as generous as it can be about allowing for software development for interfacing with its monitors, as best I can tell.

So there's probably a way to do what I want. I just don't have enough time to learn how to do it right now.