Com Greyed out in tools using Ubuntu 9.04

Hello

I was wanting to know what could be the causes for the com port to be greyed out in ubuntu.

I have all the necessary programs and followed all the guides on the arduino playground but am very unfamiler with Ubuntu usb system.

I have all user permissions i.e system administration users

Av seen people with the problem in the past but none gave a straight answer that worked.

Com port i.e Serial Port

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 with no issues, thinking back to when I first installed Arduino on 8.10 I seem to recall I had problems not having the correct version of Java Installed. I seem to remember it had to be real 'Sun' java not the open source stuff. In synaptic package manager, remove any existing Java and install what I have :

I just unarchived the downloaded arduino tar into my home folder. The standard version of the rest of the pre-requisites work OK for me

I'm on 32 bit which may have a bearing if you aren't.

First, when you plug in the Arduino, does it create a /dev/ttyUSB* node?

Do you get any messages in /var/log/messages or dmesg|tail ?

Second, in Ubuntu make sure that your user account is a member of the uucp group. This will give you access to the USB-to-serial ports /dev/ttyUSB*.

Third, when you start up the arduino IDE do you get any errors from the rxtx library ? (If you've created an icon/menu item to run the IDE, run a terminal and load the IDE so you can see any error messages).

Hope this helps to get you started

Ver

Well this is denied

bash: /dev/ttyUSB0: Permission denied

bash: /var/log/messages: Permission denied

from dmesf|tail

[ 3136.680783] usb 3-1: device not accepting address 39, error -71
[ 3136.680814] hub 3-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1
[ 3465.247605] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
[ 3465.247622] USB Serial support registered for generic
[ 3465.247639] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[ 3465.247642] usbserial: USB Serial Driver core
[ 3465.276078] USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
[ 3465.276156] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
[ 3465.276160] ftdi_sio: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver
[ 4140.312061] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -287957131 ns)

Finally How do you access the uucp group?

The permission denied isnt good am thinking!

Java update didnt work sorry!

Forgot to mention denied in root and normal user area

I used

sudo usermod -a -G uucp

which adds me to the list from another forum

Still no result

Installed the uucp package no luck, try tommrow!

You get permission denied messages because /var/log/messages amd /dev/ttyUSB0 aren't executables, its perfectly normal. To see the contents of /var/log/messages use

cat /var/log/messages

This may be very long in which case you can use :

cat /var/log/messages|tail

which will display the last 10 lines.

cat /var/log/messages|tail -n 100

will display the last 100 lines

I wouldn't recommend using cat with /dev/ttyUSB0 since it isn't a file. It can be used to pull serial data from a running arduino, but thats another story.

doing dmesg|tail on my system, just after I plug the arduino in gives

[  583.901117] usb 2-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[  603.056138] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 5
[  603.056641] ftdi_sio ttyUSB0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now disconnected from ttyUSB0
[  603.056683] ftdi_sio 2-1:1.0: device disconnected
[ 8010.141517] hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.
[ 8010.560051] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 6
[ 8010.757821] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 8010.760651] ftdi_sio 2-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 8010.760980] usb 2-1: Detected FT232RL
[ 8010.761082] usb 2-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

the numbers in brackets are the number of seconds since the computer was last started up. The stuff at 8010.***** is relevent to the arduino being plugged in. It would seem you don't have a ttyUSBx which may be relevent to your problem. Is the board known to be working ?

What kind of arduino board are you using ?.