Will Wine Support Win Apps that use serial communications ?

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shane
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Will Wine Support Win Apps that use serial communications ?

Post by shane »

I have a Win App that communicates via a COM port to another device. Does Wine support apps that have serial communication via COM ports?
Martin Gregorie

Will Wine Support Win Apps that use serial communications ?

Post by Martin Gregorie »

On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 15:49 -0500, shane wrote:
I have a Win App that communicates via a COM port to another device. Does Wine support apps that have serial communication via COM ports?
It depends.

Some programs work, some don't. Some work with 'proper' serial ports,
e.g. those with a genuine UART chip (8250, 16550) on the motherboard or
a multiport adapter card but won't work with a USB->serial adapter.

I think the issue is that Microsoft support for serial ports is
non-existent. AFAIK neither DOS nor Windows has ever provided a serial
comms API, so programs that use serial ports need to deal with the bare
metal themselves. Some use roll-your-own code while others use third
party libraries such as COMM-DRIV. As a result, about all you can do is
suck it and see, but beware that you'll need to do something about
serial port access permissions because standard login users can't see
serial ports. I added a UDEV rule to make my serial ports accessible to
all (see
http://www.libelle-systems.com/free/win ... ccess.html for
details) while others make the user a member of the group that owns the
serial ports. I think this varies from distro to distro: it is 'uucp'
under Fedora but people using other distros (Debian and derivatives such
as Ubuntu?) have said it is 'dialout'.

I have a couple of quite old WfW/W95 programs that work under wine, both
from the same source. One used to work but no longer does: I've given up
on it because it uses a form of DRM that relies on hiding stuff on disk
got bored with needing a new key every time I upgraded Linux. The other
one 'just works' and has continued to do so over many Wine upgrades.
Both programs have been perfectly capable of finding all six serial
ports without any need for sym-linking etc. but both have refused to
recognise a USB serial adapter no matter what I've tried.

Martin
shane
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Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 26, 2012 1:27 pm

Thanks!

Post by shane »

Martin,

Thanks for the info. The program I want to use would be running with a USB serial device. I appreciate the answer as you've just saved me a ton of time.

Shane
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