Since I often program Parallax/Ubicom/Scenix SX chips, I needed a good way to program the chips under Kubuntu/Ubuntu. The installation of the software under Wine worked fine. However, the program didn’t work right away.

Of course, I had already set up ~/.wine/dosdevices to have a link for com1 (ln -s /dev/ttyS0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1). You need to make sure you have permissions on that device also. Rather than open the port to the world, I noted the port is in the “dialout” group, so you can simply add yourself to that group to get read/write access to the port. For example:

alw@enterprise:~$ ls -l /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw—- 1 root dialout 4, 64 2008-08-13 06:45 /dev/ttyS0
alw@enterprise:~$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout alw

Naturally if you aren’t using your real COM1, you’d need to change /dev/ttyS0 to the right designator (although you can still call it COM1 for Wine!).

The com port autodetection was the culprit.  The trick was to open ~/.wine/user.reg and add this line:

[Software\\ParallaxInc\\SX-Key\\2.0\\Configuration\\ComPort]
“Configuration\\ComPort”=”COM1″

I’m not sure if it mattered, but since the entries are alphabetical, I put it in the “right” place. After that, it all worked fine!