I'll add that the group ownership of your USB serial device matters.
"ls -l /dev/tty*" shows owner and group, and adding your user to that
group - usually "dialout" gives your account access without having to
fiddle around in udev.
This is for Ubuntu because it seems most common, but works in most
distributions:
Doc
PS - I typically use minicom, but ckermit is my fallback when I can't
get coherent output. It will do *exactly* what you tell it; no more &
no less.
On 8/2/26 06:38, Jan-Benedict Glaw via cctalk wrote:
On Sat, 2026-08-01 19:41:08 -0500, Jon Elson via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Well, everything is a fight!
[...]
I have no idea why the laptop doesn't
communicate. I have tried
minicom, picocom and cutecom, same result on all of them.
Well, summing up:
* Check that the USB device is found at all by invoking `lsusb` as root
* Check that the serial device is found by calling `dmesg` and `ls -l /dev/ttyACM*
/dev/ttyUSB*`
* Ensure your user has permissions to access the TTY device node
* Ensure you have a corr3ct serial config (Ctrl-A O): Correct speed, bits per byte,
parity, stopbits. And disable all handshake (rts/cts, dtr/dsr, xon/xoff) initially