Serial Port Greyed Out. Tried everything from the previos Forum entry

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

I have problems uploading an arduino sketch onto my Sunfounder Mega2560.
My operating system is Ubuntu 14.04.

I have installed Arduino IDE with "sudo apt-get install arduino".
Then I plug in the board, go to tools and change to "Arduino Mega 2560" (according to Sunfounder the boards are identical)

But "Serial Port" is greyed out.

At the very bottom right of the Arduino interface there it says in a small white script that
Arduino 2560 or Mega ADK on COM1

In the log, or whatever it is, at the bottom it says:
java.lang.NullPointerException thrown while loading gnu.io.RXTXCommDriver

When I upload a sketch anyways, despite not having a serial port I get:
'Serial port 'COM1' not found. Did you select the right one from the Tools > Serial Port menu?'

I have tried ALL things that have been suggested on the forum.
So running arduino as an administrator (i.e. sudo arduino), doesn't change anything.
Removing everything (sudo apt-get purge arduino) and installing again doesn't change anything either.
In the preferences.txt file it says: serial.debug_rate=9600, which is apparently the way it should be.

The Device is recognised, as shows part of the output of "dmesg":

[ 1747.273622] usb 2-1: new full-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 1747.292285] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2341, idProduct=0042
[ 1747.292289] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=220
[ 1747.292291] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Arduino (www.arduino.cc)
[ 1747.292292] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 85436323431351C00291
[ 1747.292469] usb 2-1: ep 0x82 - rounding interval to 1024 microframes, ep desc says 2040 microframes
[ 1747.292819] cdc_acm 2-1:1.0: ttyACM1: USB ACM device
[ 2501.739735] systemd-hostnamed[3032]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname!

A friend, who knows as little about arduino and the like as i do, installed arduino on his Mac and plugged in the board. Again
the serial port was greyed out.

I don't really know what to do next. Since I think I have tried everything that I found on a forum entry named serial port greyed out, i just named this entry 'Part II'. But maybe i haven't, maybe you have some ideas?

Thanks a lot.

2

SORTED!!!

I have uninstalled the arduino from the ubuntu package installer and installed instead the one from the www.arduino.cc

Yippiee!!!

:slight_smile:

3

FYI, the apt-get will install 1.0.1 only. The latest version is not included in the apt-get.

also don't laugh too soon. What you have is a counterfeit. USB vid 2341 belongs to arduino LLC. Whatever sunfounder is doing is stealing from arduino, unrelated to open source electronics. I bought a couple of counterfeit mega 2560 as well, before I knew the issue. Please consider buying genuine arduino next time.

4

Thanks a lot for the advice.
I am new to Arduino and wasn't aware of the counterfeit.