Why RS-232 ports suck in Linux, and how to work with this.....

As people may know , i am quite a lot into every OS other then windows.....
If it is *ux based (UNIX, Linux, mac OSX, free/OpenBSD) i am happy....
I just love the rock solid performance which doesn't degrade like windows to 0 in a year....if you are lucky.......

There is 1 thing which can be a f***ing pain in the @$$ when you wanna be a ham who does rig cat control.... the com port configuration.....
Windows just shows you the com ports which are really in the system (virtual configurations excepted, but if you are doing that, this post is old news ;) ).
So if you see a COM1 its there and active.... USBtoRS232 cables usualy show up around com number 8 , but still, if its there its there.....

so how do we know what com ports we have in our Linux system......
Well, this is a bit tricky... as Linux is flexible as a paper towel, the com port can end up almost anywhere you (don't) want...

Ok lets see how many com ports (not USB stuff) Linux thinks we have.....
Open a terminal (make sure you are root by typing su ) and type this: ls /dev/ttyS*  (this roughly means list all serial tty devices )

Now, don get scared , we do not have 32 com ports in this system.....
Crap , so now we still know nothing.... Well yes we do we actually know what the device names are called and how they are written... (caps is important)

so, we continue...... next command.... cat /proc/tty/driver/serial

We see here that the com1 uart and com2 uart are hooked to ttyS4 and ttyS5.

My TS-480 is hooked up to com1 , which translates into /dev/ttyS4

As soon as I told this device name to cqrlog, it worked like a charm.....

Ok, now the USB2Serial cables..... 

This has to be written as soon as Hans (PD0AC hamgear.wordpress.com) is done with my cable :)

Soo... to be continued.....