General serial communications issues

[Raul Dias]

Hi,

I have problems with wine serial code since 2000/2001.
I think this might be related to your problem.

In my situation, I have a bunch of stores that runs linux.
Their sales sistem is remote application that can be run thru
ssh/telnet/...

Unfortunally they are required to use expensive serial fiscal printers
that does not work with linux.

The solution was to use netterm, a freeware term program, that given
special escape sequences, it will handle it to a proprietary dll that
them comunicates to the printer driver.

Everything worked fine until the serial rewrite somewhere between 2000
and 2001.

One strange thing is that some new printers (different brand) now works
fine with wine, while the older printer does not.

I can only get them to work with wine 20001026.
So you probably should try that out if you have a chance.

One problem is that this is a really old version of wine, which makes it
really difficult to compile under a new distro with gcc 3.x, new glibc
and probably kernel 2.6.

I am not a serial expert, but I don't understand what can change in the
serial communication to work with one printer and not work with another
(that use to work).
For me serial is TX, RX and a few control pins and that's it.

Does anyone knows what really changed in the serial code?

Should the new code works like the old one or is there fundamental
differences that makes this incompatible?

Could this be a API problem and not a problem in the way serial is
handled?

I have the same application with both wines. Old 20001026 (in a old
distro) for the old printer and recent builds (in fresh distro) for the
new printer in different machines.
Is there any debugging code I can generate to help solve or find where
the problem lies?

I really would like to help solve this issue, however I have little
win32 knowledge.

[]'s
Raul Dias




On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 14:06, David Purucker wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have tried several terminal programs (Hyperterm and TeraTerm) under 
> several builds of
> Wine including Wine-20040505 and they seem to have the same generic problem.
> 
> They all exhibit the same situation, DATA seems to go OUT, but never seems 
> to come IN.
> Several other people have experienced the same thing, as seen in this bug 
> report:
> http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2115
> 
> By the way, TeraTerm does work fine in TCP/IP mode, so it's definitely a 
> serial problem.
> It's freeware available here:  
> http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html
> 
> It appears to be a fundamental problem in the serial/file code, which I 
> understand is now
> under the ntdll tree.  Obviously, I don't know much about it, but there is 
> definitely
> something wrong.
> 
> I was wondering if any developers were aware of this problem, as the 
> decreased general
> usage of serial communications may have caused this to slip under the 
> carpet, so to speak.
> 
> I look forward to hearing any ideas, work-arounds, or patches.
> 
> Thanks
> 
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