Technical details

Communication with devices

Here is a commented log when formatting a SSSD floppy disk with the TI disk controller. Actually, this dump was achieved using MESS and putting in some printf lines.

Setting up RXTX for Java

RXTX is a serial and parallel port API implementation which is available for Windows and Unix systems, as binary and source code files. The complete documentation and the download location is at http://rxtx.qbang.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. You should build the binaries for 64 bit systems from the sources.

Instructions for Linux:

• Unzip the file
• Enter the source directory, ./configure
• Install missing libraries if errors are reported.
• make
• make install

The file RXTXcomm.jar should now be found in the lib/ext folder of your Java installation. The native libraries librxtxSerial.so, librxtxParallel.so and more have been copied into the lib/i386 or lib/amd64 folders (32 bit or 64 bit build; Intel 64 bit also uses the amd64 folder).

At first you will likely get an error message during Java execution:

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

You must be member of the uucp and lock groups. Check /etc/group and add your user name behind both lines, or use your favorite system management tool. You must log out and log in again to make these changes effective. After this change, no such error message should be reported on the command line anymore.