First - here's what's happening now: the port menu is greyed out and I can no longer select the port to upload my sketches. It worked earlier today, which is what puzzles me the most. Nothing, with the exception on my machine going to sleep, changed.
OS: Ubuntu 16.04
IDE: 1.6.10, upgraded from .9
History: loaded arduino use apt-get and got some old version, which I neglected to remove. Once I realized I was not seeing what was in all the pictures... I RTFM. I then d/l the app from here and installed.
Plugged in my mBot today and uploaded sketches. Many, many sketches. Occasionally, I would get an error msg stating the USB port wasn't there, but either resetting the mBot or powering it off/on solved the issue. Till it didn't.
I get lights on the board the second usb is plugged in.
After the last error msg stating the board couldn't be found at the port, I restarted the app. That's when the port menu item became greyed out.
So, I've tried adding myself to dialout and tty (did that this morning...and a couple of times since). Checked ownership on the 'arduino' directory in usr/share and took ownership of it since it was owned by root. No joy.
Many reboots, logon-off-on. No joy.
Uninstalled through apt-get the original version I installed. Since I'm still writing this, again, no joy. In fact, the directory and all files still remain in usr/share.
When I check properties of the icon on the desktop from the gui install, it shows the directory location as me/downloads.
I saw a posting from someone else with the issue and they used 'sudo arduino' and it worked. That fired up the old version and it didn't work there, either.
Suggestions?