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On Redhat Enterprise Linux WS4: When I activate the Terminal view / settings dialog and switch to "Serial" connection type, I don't see any ports listed in the "Port" dropdown. On stderr, I see lots of the following message printed: check_group_uucp(): error testing lock file creation Error details:Permission deniedcheck_lock_status: No permission to create lock file. please see: How can I use Lock Files with rxtx? in INSTALL It turns out that I can fix this on Redhat by editing /etc/group and adding my user id to the "lock" group. I also need to make /var/lock group-writable. Then, rxtx creates file /var/lock/LCK..ttyS0 and no more error messages are shown. I think that the following needs to be fixed: 1. RXTX should have an option for disabling lockfiles at runtime, without having to recompile. Either via a System Property, or via some API. Some users don't have "root" access, just need to get going and dont care about lockfiles. Commercial applications which embed RXTX need to make sure their products can actually be used. Also note that the old Sun javax.comm (with RXTX 1.4 jcl.jar) worked fine on my machine without any group id tweaks for lockfiles, so this is kind of a regression. 2. In the error message printed by RXTX, the following information should be added: 3a) Path of the file that RXTX tried to create -- knowing it was below /var/lock would have made it a lot easier for me to fix it 3b) If (1) is done, information how to set the System Property for disabling lockfiles 3. RXTX INSTALL should be more explicit about having to add to group "lock" instead of "uucp" on modern Redhat Linux. 4. If there is a modern Linux Standard for locking devices (from normal user permissions, without fixing any group ids!) this standard should be used. On the RXTX mailing list http://mailman.qbang.org/mailman/listinfo/rxtx the issue of lockfiles has been discussed quite a bit. A new version of RXTX seems to be due early march.
An interesting posting from the rxtx mailing list addresses (1): http://mailman.qbang.org/pipermail/rxtx/Week-of-Mon-20060320/794221.html
An Eclipse-specific version of RXTX which does not need lockfiles is now available via Update Manager on this update site: http://rxtx.qbang.org/eclipse/ or for download, as an SDK or runtime: http://rxtx.qbang.org/eclipse/downloads/ Just install this into Eclipse and it'll work.
