How to use serial port in a Mono application under Linux?

Question

I would like to use an application under Debian, that is written in .net appearantly. I don't have the source, only the .exe file. I installed mono from the Debian repositories. The program starts and runs fine.

The program is not a complicated one, and uses serial port. (This is a car ECU programmer.)

The program seems written in a way, I can only select COM0...COM100 as serial port, seems not prepared for Linux.

Is there any way for making it work under Linux?

What I did so far, I added an udev rule (ACTION=="add" KERNEL=="ttyUSB0" NAME="COM0"), but it didn'T work.

Is there any way on operating system or on mono framework level, that would lure the program to use the /dev/ttyUSB0 by selecting "COM0" in the application itself?

Error messages in the application when trying to reach the COM0 port: "CloseObdPort: Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and then "No such file or directory"

Regards, Daniel

Answer 1

Check that the user is member of dialout group. You can do this using the 'groups' command.

To add a user to dialout group, you can use -: 'sudo adduser username dialout'

From memory I think you need to log out & back in to take effect.

Answer 2

I'm answering my own question:

The solution is surprisingly simpe: I created a symlink ./COM0 -> /dev/ttyUSB0

This way the application was looking for "COM0" in the application root, it found the symlink and managed to open the port.