RUMtrol7000 working on Linux Ubuntu 9.10

Control and memory management software for Icom transceivers
WO0OF
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon 2. Nov 2009, 21:04

RUMtrol7000 working on Linux Ubuntu 9.10

Unread post by WO0OF »

Linux users-

Herein I describe my successful effort to get RUMtrol7000 v. 2.1 working on Linux Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The purpose of this post is to save the next person some time spent looking for solutions to simple problems.

My installation is on a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop computer that doesn't have a serial port. That necessitated purchase of a USB to CI-V adapter. I found one on eBay for about ten bucks that works quite well. It's a Prolific Technologies PL2303. I had previously used it successfully with ROMtrol7000 on Windows.

Downloading the Linux archive from the DL2RUM.de website was straightforward. There is no installer, so I extracted the Linux directory in the archive to my home directory.

Next was to launch the RUMtrol7000 binary. In my case, it wouldn't launch at all. It was attempting to load a shared object library which was missing. That library was 'libstdc++.so.5'. Upon some research it seems that newer Linux distros have gone to version 6 of the c++ library and version 5 is no longer included in the distributions. If you have an older Linux distribution this won't be a problem. The solution for newer versions is to download the old version 5 library and manually install it along side verion 6. For Ubuntu distributions it can be found here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/i386/ ... 5/download
For other distributions of Linux you'll have to Google for it. I installed it, making sure that both the actual library (with version number) and a symlink to it (without version number) were put into the '/usr/lib' directory. Both are needed.

After that, I was able to launch RUMtrol.

Then the challenge was to open a connection to the USB serial adapter in RUMtrol. (in RUMtrol, [File}->[preferences...].) For selection of a serial port RUMtrol gave me options of ttyS0 through ttyS3. I tried them all with no luck. Upon investigating the '/dev' directory it became apparent that not only did my USB serial adapter not map to a ttySn device, it wasn't even recognized at all. Seems that this distro of Linux does not automatically detect such devices and load appropriate drivers. How to fix that? After some research I found that the method is to find the manufacturer code and model number of the serial adapter and then tell the operating system what to do when it sees it. It is necessary to capture some events that record the manufacturer information, and then modprobe the OS to make it aware of the device. Rather than go through the whole process here, there's a good description at:
http://blog.mypapit.net/2008/05/how-to- ... buntu.html

That created a nice new device, '/dev/ttyUSB0'.

Running RUMtrol again, and trying to make the connection, I found that RUMtrol wouldn't find the new device. Apparently RUMtrol only looks for 'ttySn' devices, not 'ttyUSBn' devices. Perhaps a future version will do this (hint, hint). The obvious way around this was to make a symbolic link from ttyUSB0 to a new ttySn name that would be recognized by RUMtrol. I used 'ttyS4' for the new device name. The link was easily made with a command line like:

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sudo ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyS4
That created the symbolic link, and RUMtrol was able to recognize it as ttyS4. Setting data rate to 9600 in RUMtrol and 'auto' on the IC7000, everything worked. No other checkboxes marked in the preferences, and the slider about 2/3 to the right.

The only problem at this point was that the symbolic link disappeared after every reboot. What was needed was a way to make the link permanent to the operating system. That was not hard to accomplish. There's a utility called udev that runs with the OS to pass it rules on how to handle devices and events. It was simple to make a udev rule to make the symbolic link. I opened a text editor with root privileges. Then, I typed in a line like:

Code: Select all

KERNEL=="ttyUSB0" SYMLINK="ttyS4"
Then I saved the file in the '/etc/udev/rules.d/' directory with a unique file name, with the '.rules' extension. ('anyfilename.rules' will do)

I rebooted the system and all worked perfectly. Drivers and links were perfect.

All's well as ends well, as they say. But, it did take a good deal of reasearch and problem solving. I hope this post makes things a bit easier for the next intrepid soul.

Best regards,

— Warren (WOØOF) —
WO0OF
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon 2. Nov 2009, 21:04

Re: RUMtrol7000 working on Linux Ubuntu 9.10

Unread post by WO0OF »

I should have included this in the original post. If you happen to buy the same make and model of USB to CI-V converter that I did (Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port) then the manufacturer code is 067b and the model code is 2303. Thus you can skip all that stuff about discovering these codes. To create the ttyUSB0 device just type in:

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x067b product=0x2303
Good luck,

— Warren (WOØOF) —
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