[aprssig] Kenwood D7 software on Linux?

[kf4lvz at yahoo.com]

> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 09:04:25 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Pierre Thibaudeau 
> 
> One more thing,
> 
> On most distributions, access to the serial ports is
> permitted to root and 
> to members of the "uucp" group. Unless you are running as
> root (which is 
> never a good idea), you should edit the /etc/group to add
> your own user id 
> to the uucp line:
> 
>    uucp:x:14:uucp,<your_username>

Usually it's dialout not uucp on the more recent distributions.  The best method is to just perform a long ls on the device and see what group it belongs to:

$ ls -l /dev/ttyS*
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Mar 14  2002 /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 Jul 20  2006 /dev/ttyS1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 66 Mar 14  2002 /dev/ttyS2
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 Mar 14  2002 /dev/ttyS3

Then become a member of that group.


> 
> >    The annoyance is that Linux has it stuck
> in its mind that the second 
> >    and third serial ports (which are via an
> add-in PCI card with no 
> >    jumpers) are /dev/ttyS4 and S5.  The
> previous incarnation of the 
> >    system (OpenSuSE 10.2) was well behaved
> and numbered them S1 and S2, 
> >    but a previous one to that had them up in
> the teens (S14 and S15, if 
> >    I recall).  I don't know of any way
> to change that; is there?

Sure there is.  Just blow away the /dev/ttySx's that you want to use and then use mknod to create a new set with the proper major and minor numbers that your PCI port is using.  From my pasted ls output above, my ttyS3 is major 4 minor 67 with mode 660 (rw-rw----).  Suppose I want to make that ttyS1 without using a symlink:

as root:
rm /dev/ttyS1
mknod --mode=660 /dev/ttyS1 c 4 67


> On startup, linux precreates the /dev/ttyS0 to 3 regardless
> of there 
> actual presence. Addon boards are assigned from 4.

This is because Linux will assign the addon boards to the next available node numbers and then create the /dev files based on those sequential node numbers.