[Wine] problem launching PC400 (campbell scientific) with wine

[Martin Gregorie]

On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 06:30 -0500, Joonaaz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been able to install and launch PC200 with wine, but it does
> not show any COM ports. I have even made these symbolic links:
> ln -s /dev/ttyS0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1 
> ln -s /dev/ttyS1 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com2
> etc. , but nothing shows up.
> 
> Can you help me, please.
>
Are you using real serial ports (based round a 16550 UART) or a USB
adaptor? Wine can't see some USB adapters but IME can always see real
UARTs.

Be aware that the Linux kernel will always create /dev/ttyS[0-3] at boot
time regardless of whether the computer hardware actually has any serial
ports, but of course they won't work.
  
Its worth checking whether Linux is recognising your serial ports:
Serial ports on the motherboard or a PCI serial adapter card should be
recognised at boot time: run "dmesg | less" and scroll through the boot
report it displays. This will show you how many UARTS Linux has found
and activated. If you have more than 4 installed, you'll need to provide
the kernel argument:
	8250.nr_uarts=n
at boot time, best done by editing /root/grub/grub.conf - 'n' is the
number of serial ports you have installed. Some hints on editing the
GRUB config file are here:
http://www.libelle-systems.com/free/grub/visible_menu.html

USB adapters are different: their devices are called /dev/ttyUSBn where
'n' is 0 for the first one and is incremented for each adapter. These
are created as the adapter is plugged in and destroyed as it is removed:
you can try using a symlink but bear in mind that it will be invalid
when the adapter isn't plugged in. As I said, I haven't had any joy with
USB adapters, though the Belkin is said to work with Wine. I bought a
six port serial PCI card which 'just worked' once I'd added the kernel
argument to say I have six serial ports. This works without needing any
COMn: symlinks and has done over many Wine versions and several RedHat
Fedora upgrades.
 

Martin