Bug#646069: rxtx: cryptic port open failure messages

[Philip Ashmore]

Package: rxtx
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?
I just got an Arduino Uno and I couldn't get the software to "see" the board -
no ports listed.

A few hours later I got it working - it would have been quicker if the error
reports told more.

I also found a reference to a file called "gnu.io.rxtx.properties" which is to
be found in one of the
Java extension directories - the attached patch handles the case where the
"java.ext.dirs"
system property contains more than one directory.

The real clincher was in SerialImp.h/c where I print the port and the open()
error return code.

This is how I found out that you need to log out and then back in again for
group additions to
take effect!

I entered the source tree after "apt-get source"ing rxtx and went through

  configure --prefix=/usr; make; sudo make install

with debugging added with "make -DDEBUG_VERBOSE" I finally tracked it down.

Take the patch or leave it, but if you could, please get

  sudo make uninstall

working from the source tree!

Thanks.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers proposed-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_IE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_IE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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