[Coco] DW4/Prolific USB/Xubuntu 13.10 Fail

[Aaron Wolfe]

I am traveling so don't have access to everything but maybe some general
info will help.

None of the rs232 control lines are used by drivewire or a regular coco.  I
am not sure if the serial port on your FPGA board requires any of them to
be set, but this is a potential issue.  You can configure DW to set various
rs232 parameters by editing config.xml.  I forget the exact names of the
parameters but they should be obvious if you look through the advanced
serial port stuff.

Current versions of DW use a built in rxtx library by default, so the
version installed on your system should not be a factor.  You can tell DW
not too use the built in version and instead load whatever is installed by
your os in config.XML, I doubt it matters but worth a shot.  Again I forget
exactly what I called that option but its something like load-rxtx and
takes true/false.  Not to be confused with use-rxtx which when false tells
DW to disable all serial code.

Finally, while my experience with prolific adapters has been great, there
are plenty of folks who think they are junk.  Maybe some of them are?  If
you can connect a to another PC it would be worth confirming you can pass
data at 115k or whatever rate you use on the FPGA board.  If it works in
minicom or any terminal program, it will very likely work fine with DW.

Good luck..

On Dec 25, 2013 10:42 PM, "Joel Ewy" <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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