[Coco] DW4/Prolific USB/Xubuntu 13.10 Fail

[Joel Ewy]

I'm trying to get DW4.3.30 working in a somewhat new environment with 
poor luck.  When enough caps dried out on my old P4 motherboard I had to 
move my HD to a slightly more recent machine.  (I've got caps to fix it, 
but I'm already spoiled by the slightly faster CPU and more RAM on the 
newer machine.)  I also upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to Xubuntu 13.10.  My 
Drivewire is the same as what I had been using in the old incarnation, 
but the new machine has no serial ports.  (What were they thinking? :) )

I have one of these USB/Serial thingies.  It's a Prolific -- cheap and 
sucky, but Aaron says they work for him, right?  (I also want to get it 
working so I can try out the Raspberry Pi as DW4 server. I might even 
have space to pack one into the Coco 3 case with the CoCo3FPGA and make 
a self-contained PiCo with WiFi.)

Well, since the OS upgrade I needed to reinstall rxtx, which I have 
done.  At first I couldn't get DW4 to even see /dev/ttyUSB0.  I added my 
user account to the dialout group, but that apparently did nothing.  
When I set r/w permissions for all to ttyUSB0, Drivewire was able to see 
the serial port.  So far, so good.

But my CoCo3FPGA gives I/O errors when I try to boot NitrOS9, or even 
DIR from DECB.

I dug out an old laptop that does have a real serial port and an older 
version of Drivewire and did get that to work with the CoCo3FPGA, which 
allayed my fears that I had blown the serial port on the Digilent 
board.  Next I dug up an old RS-232 tester.  When I plug it into the 
CoCo3FPGA, or a regular CoCo 3's Drivewire cable, I get only RD lit up 
in red (low?).  When I plug the other end into the laptop's real serial 
port, I get TD, RTS, and DTR red.  When I start up DW on the laptop, 
DSR, CD, DTR, RTS, and CTS go green. When I plug it into the USB Serial 
adapter, I get about the same thing, but when I start DW4 all the LEDs 
stay red.

I see that Fred Provoncha was having what appears to be a very similar 
problem in 2012 that finally went away when he switched from Ubuntu 
12.04 to Linux Mint 13.  I wonder if there's a problem with the version 
of rxtx in Ubuntu's repos.  Synaptic installed rxtx 2.2pre2-11 for me.  
Anybody know if this is a bad version?  Other suggestions?

JCE