[Wine] Serial port problem

[Martin Gregorie]

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 12:34 -0500, folderol wrote:
> Unless I'm mistaken, z-modem is quite heavily error-checked, so losing
> some characters could probably be absorbed without you noticing.
>
Yes, the Z-modem protocol uses block-level checksums and will re-request
failing blocks. However I think I'd notice if it was re-requesting
transfers: the program displays a running total of blocks transferred.
This clicks up steadily and at about the same speed as it did on a
Win95. I haven't noticed any pauses while its doing this, so I don't
think I'm getting retries. 

Typical file sizes are 100-200KB and the transfers are done at 9600
baud. As the blocks transferred count is roughly the same as the file
size in KB I assume its using a 1KB blocksize. During a transfer the
count clicks over at around 4-5 blocks per second, which matches the
baud rate and guessed block size, so its certainly not re-requesting
every block - that would drop the rate to nearer 2 blocks/sec, which
would look obviously slower than I see when a transfer is running. 

>  The Application I'm using only checks the validity of entire strings,
> and doesn't retry - it just aborts.
> 
> Yeah, I know. Crap :(
> 
I can't argue with that.

As my logger downloads are running reliably at 9600 baud on a fairly
slow computer (an 866 MHz P3 box) I don't think your problem is in WINE.

Can you try using something else to do transfers over the link (e.g.
minicom or Kermit) to check it isn't a hardware problem? Kermit would be
ideal, provided you can install it at both ends, since its available for
both Linux and DOS/Windows and does display error stats. Also, you could
try both the Linux port and the DOS/Windows port under WINE at that end
of the link. In addition the file transfer test can be scripted and
tried easily at a variety of baud rates.

HTH


Martin