Need help with a serial port

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Steven W. Orr wrote:
> My new 'puter came with no serial port. For $2.49 I bought a pci card
> that has two serial ports and a parallel port. I plugged the card in and
> rebooted. At boot kudzu ran but did not detect that anything new was
> going on. When I try to hook up my palm to the serial port I get this
> message:
> 
> 521 > pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttys0 -b .
>    Unable to bind to port: /dev/ttys0
>    Please use --help for more information
> 
> Same for ttyS1.
> 
> Also, here's the output of lspci:
> 
> 523 > lspci
> 05:08.0 Communication controller: NetMos Technology PCI 9835 Multi-I/O
> Controller (rev 01)
> 
This is the I/O card.
> 
> Is there a driver I need to modprobe? Anything I need to do?
> 
> I'm lost. :-(
> 
> TIA
> 
The first thing you probably need is the parport_serial modual. When
you modprobe this modula, it may or may not create the serial ports
you need. I am using one on a Mandriva system, and at one time it
would set up the serial ports as well, but this no longer works for
me. I have to use setserial to set them up now. The other thing to
be aware of is that the ports may be /dev/ttyS4 and /dev/ttyS5.
Ports /dev/ttyS0 through /dev/ttyS3 are usually reserved for the
onboard serial ports. I am not sure how it would be handled in your
case.

If you have to set the ports up by hand, you will need to run
"lspic -v" to get the port numbers and IRQ. You should see something
like this:

02:0a.0 Communication controller: NetMos Technology PCI 9835
Multi-I/O Controller (rev 01)
        Subsystem: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 1P2S
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 21
        I/O ports at 1090 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 1098 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 10a0 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 10a8 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 10b0 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 1080 [size=16]

The first 2 ports are the serial ports. What I did was create a file
/etc/rc.d/rc.serial that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
#Configure extra serial ports.
#
/bin/setserial /dev/ttyS2 uart 16550A port 0x1090 irq 21 baud_base
115200 spd_normal
/bin/setserial /dev/ttyS3 uart 16550A port 0x1098 irq 21 baud_base
115200 spd_normal

If you have to go this route, you will probably want to use ttyS0
and ttyS1 instead of ttyS2 and ttyS3.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!