Serial port not working with PuTTY

Asked by Rick Harwood

I have recently installed Ubuntu 12.10 desktop on my Dell Latitude laptop. Everything seems to be OK except that I cannot use the serial option in PuTTY as it says "Unable to open serial port".
Can anyone help me to resolve this?

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Rick Harwood
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#1

What about if you use ssh from the command line instead?

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Rick Harwood (rick-h) said :
#2

SSH works fine from PuTTY. It's just when using the serial port it doesn't work.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#3

What is the output of:

ls /dev/ | grep -i ttys; lsb_release -a; uname -a

Thanks

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Rick Harwood (rick-h) said :
#4

administrator@Latitude-D531:~$ ls /dev/ | grep -i ttys;lsb_release -a; uname -a
ttyS0
ttyS1
ttyS10
ttyS11
ttyS12
ttyS13
ttyS14
ttyS15
ttyS16
ttyS17
ttyS18
ttyS19
ttyS2
ttyS20
ttyS21
ttyS22
ttyS23
ttyS24
ttyS25
ttyS26
ttyS27
ttyS28
ttyS29
ttyS3
ttyS30
ttyS31
ttyS4
ttyS5
ttyS6
ttyS7
ttyS8
ttyS9
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.10
Release: 12.10
Codename: quantal
Linux Latitude-D531 3.5.0-24-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Thu Feb 7 05:32:22 UTC 2013 i686 athlon i686 GNU/Linux
administrator@Latitude-D531:~$

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Ray T (raymond-thomson76) said :
#5

Hi,

just to check if its privileges
Have you tryed running putty from the command line as "sudo putty" ?

I had the same problem accessing a Serial device a while ago and if memory serves this could have been the problem!

Hope it is...

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#6

gksudo for GUI applications. Not sudo.

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Ray T (raymond-thomson76) said :
#7

Hi actionparsnip

"sudo putty" worked for me, but after reading your comment done a bit of googling and found

sudo vs gksudo
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=851911

So i stand corrected and have learnt something new !!

So Thank you :o)

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Rick Harwood (rick-h) said :
#8

Ok, this worked, but it's a but of messing around. How do I make it so that I have rights to the serial device?

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Rick Harwood (rick-h) said :
#9

I managed to find the answer to my rights problem.

I added my user to the dialout group with the command:
sudo adduser "My User" dialout
Then logged out and back in and now it's all working perfectly.

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Ray T (raymond-thomson76) said :
#10

Sweet, i think thats what i ended up doing.

anyways glad to hear its sorted !