Incidentally, a really good source of specific info about Linux problems is the site askubuntu.com. It's one of the Stackexchange Q&A sites, and full of very clued up folks. Obviously a lot of info is going to be applicable to non-Ubuntu machines, too.

If you only want to use the command-line tools then just install ow-shell.

If you only want the owserver then just install owserver, which if installed, runs, unless configured not to.

Use owfs.conf to configure which buses are accessed.

The packaging allows all this and seems entirely sensible to me.

An /etc/default/owserver on/off switch would be useful. As ever patches are welcome.

As an experiment I recently bought a USB dongle for 1-wire devices. Instead of going for the mainstream device, I chose a cheaper one from an online auction site and shipped from Hong Kong, which also had the advantage of connecting using 3.5mm jacks making it easier to connect devices.

It works fine on my Windows machine, but my Linux box doesn't have the driver for the USB to serial bridge used (which appears to be a Chinese knock-off of another Chinese device) and it's not readily available (short of configuring and compiling it into my kernel). Newer versions of the kernel should have support built-in, but my distribution tends to lag everyone else for stability and hasn't been updated for a while (a new one is in beta testing).

Now, I wish I'd bought the mainstream device instead, but I'll do some basic testing on Windows and migrate to Linux when my distribution is updated.

Be warned.

Ah, so you did. I saw post of folks farting about compiling and searched the thread for "launchpad", but you've only got your very own repo. Nice work! ;)