Difference between revisions of "Serial Hack"

Latest revision as of 09:24, 14 January 2010

This should no longer be needed. If it is, please file a detailed bug report.

Serial List Hack

In some situations, (which, I might add are becoming more and more common now) a core or core/hybrid may not have enough, or indeed, any serial ports for automation kit such as the X10 modules to jack into.

In these cases a USB-to-Serial converter may be used, but LinuxMCE does not list these correctly in its admin pages. This is due to the script "/usr/pluto/bin/ListSerialPorts.sh" which creates the list of serial ports, not giving the correct path (usually /dev/ttyUSB#, where # is a number).

A simple replacement, which, while inferior to the current script in that it does not detect the ports in use, does correctly list all serial ports, both USB and normal serial. However, it requires the 'tree' command, so:

sudo apt-get install tree

Once that has completed, tree will have been installed, and we can use its '-fi' mode to produce full paths, then it is just a simple matter of removing the original ListSerialPorts.sh file and writing our own, just copy these commands in a terminal window (see Editing_Text for alternative options), it will make a backup of the old script too:

mv -iv /usr/pluto/bin/ListSerialPorts.sh /usr/pluto/bin/ListSerialPorts.sh-`date '+%Y%m%d:%H%M'` &&
cat >/usr/pluto/bin/ListSerialPorts.sh << "EOF"
#!/bin/bash

tree -fi /dev | grep ttyS
tree -fi /dev | grep ttyUSB
EOF

Comments

If someone out there has a better way of doing this, please post it here! -AVJohn