[ltp] Serial port not working on 600E--PROBLEM RESOLVED!!

[Mike Storke]

I FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM!!!!  The problem, as I
suspected was in the BIOS, but not where I thought.

What turned out to be going on is that the BIOS had
never gotten the command to turn the damn thing on in
the first place!  Instead of messing with tpctl (which
I still need to compile), I just ran "ps2" under
wincrap...and discovered that both the serial and IR
interfaces were set to be permanently disabled!!
Thus, the reason it worked under wincrap was because
it was enabling it itself when the device was being
accessed, whereas in Linux, because I hadn't installed
tpctl (and even if I did, it wouldn't be automatic),
it remained disabled.  So, using the "ps2" utility to
set both ports to enabled and then manually resolving
an IRQ conflict between the two (by sticking the IR on
the next port) and then rebooting the machine resulted
in the serial driver detecting both ports, and minicom
talking to the port just fine.  Next step is compiling
tpctl (which both it and the thinkpad drivers are up
to 4.1, so download the latest version!) and setting
it up, and then downloading and compiling the IrDA
drivers so I can talk to my phone through that (yes,
the phone has an IR port).  Oh, yeah, the phone talks
to the computer via PPP, so I need to configure that,
but that's a snap, having gone through the pain many
times in the past. :)

Hope this helps anyone else with this problem!

Mike


--- Mike Storke <storkus@yahoo.com> wrote:
> This was in a thread earlier this month, but I never
> saw an answer, so I'm starting it again because I
> have
> the same problem.
> 
> The problem is deceptively simple: the serial port
> works fine under win-98, but not under Linux.  Seyon
> reports nothing but I/O errors no matter what you
> do,
> and setserial says that the driver doesn't know what
> kind of chipset is in use (even after "autoconfig"
> and
> "auto_irq" are issued).
> 
> The only possibility that seems reasonable is
> something
> I saw written about somewhere else in passing: that
> the BIOS may be shutting off the serial port every
> single time the system is booted.  The answer, then,
> would be to run the appropriate command to tpctl in
> a
> script, which I'm going to do shortly.  But if that
> doesn't work, I'm definitely stumped, so any help
> would
> be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks, Mike
> 
> P.S. If you're wondering what I'd want such an old,
> kludgy interface for, it's the connector to my
> brand-
> new GSM/GPRS phone for connecting out to the 'net
> all
> portable-like! :)
> 
> 
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