Re: serial port connection using minicom: no data

On 28/09/2010 21:43, Grant Edwards wrote:
On 2010-09-28, Kenny McCormack<gazelle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article<Xns9E018153B7BBC6650A1FC0D7811DDBC81@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Rahul<nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
I found minicom via a google search. If there is a better alternative I'm
up for trying that one too.

I always found minicom weird and hard to use. It seems to be a program
bound-and-determined to make itself difficult to use.

My sentiments exactly. I avoid minicom if at all possible. It has one
of the most convoluted and obtuse UIs I've ever seen in a console-mode
program. That and its mule-like insistence that you're supposed to
have a modem connected to every serial port never cease to annoy me.

I may be a bit old school, but I still use Kermit whenever I need to
do serial port stuff. Kermit is rock-solid and has been for 25+
years. Just don't look at the source code. You'll go blind.
Compatibility with every OS and C compiler shipped since 1980 is _not_
a pretty thing.

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ck80.html

I usually build it without lockfile support since that just gets in
the way of the sort of stuff I do.

For serial comms under Unix (GUI), I've long used Seyon - it is also
is a little hard to setup/configure [*], but once you get past that,
it works very well.

But, and here's really the point, a really nice console mode serial
comm program is the "screen" program. It is easy to configure/setup
and it "just works". On one particular Unix system, where I use
screen exclusively for serial connections, the last line in my
.screenrc file is something like:

screen /dev/ttyXX 115200

So, when I run screen from the shell prompt, I am immediately
connected to the serial port. So, I suggest you try this instead of
minicom.

Well, I'll be darned.

I've been using screen for 20 years. I even ported it to the Coherent
OS (a 16-bit v7 clone) sometime back around 1990 -- after writing a
pty driver for Coherent, and I never knew screen did serial port
stuff. When I read the above, I thought you were talking about a
different program.


That's news to me too - I've been looking for something nicer than minicom for serial communications. I do most of my serial communications from a windows PC, and use Tera Term Pro there. When I have used my Linux laptop with minicom, it has worked but it's a step back to the dark ages (I'm the kind of person who prefers command-line gdb to gui debuggers, but even I find minicom old-fashioned).

I use screen daily when connecting to servers, and even when working on a desktop, but I never new it supported serial communication like this. Many thanks!
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