Wine and the serial port

[lawson_whitney at juno.com]

On Sun, 4 Nov 2001, Gerson Kurz wrote:

> I have an application that talks to hardware via the serial port.
> (Actually, it talks to a lot of hardware, banking peripherals). The app
> runs on both Win32 and OS/2.
>
> Of course, the main theme is porting the thing natively to linux (and I'm
> working on that). But just for fun I tried to get it to work with WINE, and
> while the "device emulation" works perfectly (much to my surprise, really
> good work guys!) the serial communication doesn't go far. The hardware
> receives the data, but the signals (RTS/CTS etc.) are NOT correctly handled
> by WINE.
>
> Is this an area that is being worked on?

As I understand it, Wine does not attempt to "handle" the signals.
That is up to the linux serial driver.  If your banking peripherals need
some off-brand flow control or so, I think there is some provision in
the serial driver for some of them.  You might need to condition the
port with setserial and/or stty -F before starting Wine.

True there are windose functions to read and set the lines and wait for
them to change, and as far as my app and hardware cares, they work.
In general, Wine does not work hardware directly, but uses the services
of the host *NIX OS.

Lawson

The Devil finds work for idle minds.