General serial communications issues

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Raul Dias wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 

The serial port problem has now been fixed.
It is not in the CVS yet, but the patches attached to previous emails in 
this thread, when applied to the current CVS, make serial comms work.

I hope this gets all your "serial fiscal printers" working with the 
latest wine versions.

Althought the serial comms now works, it might not work with the 
redirector your were using. Maybe you won't need the redirector any more.

Cheers
James