How do I install cutecom?

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I have RHEL Server 7.4 (Maipo).

For particular test purposes, I have successfully installed both minicom and putty by using yum. However, when root tries "yum install cutecom", I get "No package cutecom available".

My Google searches didn't help me figure out how to otherwise install cutecom on RHEL. Yet they do suggest it exists.

Any advice, please?

(I do find https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=cutecom and wonder if I must download a new rpm. I don't totally understand this process, so I'm not trying that yet. Right now, if I do "yum repolist" I get 6 lines beginning with "rhel-7". Also, in the /etc/yum.repos.d folder I have three entries: epel.repo, epel-testing.repo, and redhat.repo.)

HF
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Dusan Baljevic's picture Pro 469 points
21 June 2018 9:51 PM

Hi Helmut,

You are correct, since it is not part of any repository, you need to download RPM and install locally via rpm or yum commands. Note that there are a few prerequisites for it, so you might need to install additional packages.

As a suggestion, because cutecom is quite old (circa 2009), you might look at its updated forks:

https://github.com/develersrl/cutecom-ng

https://github.com/neundorf/CuteCom

There are many other possibilities for serial console. Maybe you would like to update the forum what exactly you are trying to achieve...

Regards,

Dusan Baljevic (amateur radio VK2COT)

HF Community Member 85 points
2 July 2018 11:08 AM

Thanks, Dusan.

Specifically, I am looking for a "previously existing, somewhat standard" serial communications / dumb terminal program that presents a user interface (command line or GUI) that allows the user to select from a specific list of serial ports.

I differentiate this from minicom that requires the user to know the desired port name by creating a symbolic link to it. I differentiate this from putty that requires the user to know the desired port name in order to type it into the GUI. Consider most Windows-based serial communications programs. They present a combo box (drop down box) that might give the options of COM1, COM3, COM9 (only the valid existing ones; I have a USB-to-serial adapter that shows up as COM9). In the case of Linux, I want the program to present options to select from such as ttyS0, ttyS1, TTYUSB0.

Note that I wrote "previously existing, somewhat standard" serial communications program. I don't want to write this program myself. My objective here is to have at least one run time example of how some other programmer decided was the appropriate way to enumerate all the serial ports. Did they simply look for devices named ttyS* and ttyUSB*? Or did they look at the [I forget the name right now] file that lists all devices of type "serial"?

Overall, my objective isn't the serial program itself, but to confirm that when I created /dev/ttyMY* and also put it into [that file] as type "serial", by using kernel tty calls, that the result is something that a well-written pre-existing program would find and present in the list along with ttyS* and ttyUSB*. So the serial program is my way of "proof of concept" that I did my kernel module correctly and that ttyMY* is a "standard" serial port accessible by anyone. (Note that some of my prior research indicated that there's in fact not a commonly accepted way to enumerate/discover all the [active] serial ports under Linux. The [active] part adds a bit of complexity, of course. The "all" part didn't seem to be solved in the same way all the time, either.)

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