Hi folks!!

First post, thanks for taking a look!!

I decided to post this here because I am not sure if it is laptop specific or can be diagnosed as a general serial port issue.

I am trying to set up a kismet laptop. It is an IBM A21m and I am running Fedora 4 (1656 I think?) I have kismet working great (I am amazed at how sesitive it is) but I can't get the serial port to work for the GPS.It is set up in the BIOS as COM2 and IRQ3. If I do dmesg | grep tty the respose is:

ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

I am not sure why it comes up twice.

If I do a ls -l /dev/ttyS1 I get:

crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 65 Jan 21 03:34 /dev/tttyS1

I also did a chmod 666 and it did not help

If I do cat /dev/ttyS1 when the GPS is hooked up (to test I suppose) I get this response:

cat: /dev/ttyS1: Input/Output error


I have an external modem on the port right now I am 99%sure is is not a winmodem. I booted off a Knoppix 4.0 CD and the "cat" response is something like:

cat: /dev/ttyS1: Device or resource in use

I don't know where to look for the boot log to see if the serial port is "on" in Fedora, I know the cable works because it works well on the winblows laptop, I can't anything to work in minicom. There was an internal miniPCI modem that I have taken out. Is there an issue with IBM laptops? Do I have to link the serial to something else?

Any suggestions would be appreciated!!

try to configure it as com1 and also play with the irq, maybe there is something connected form the miniPCI modem. interupts are supposed to be shareable on PCI but trying doesn't harm. you can also specify the com-parameters as kernel parameters (look for a file like Document/kernel-parameters.txt in the kernel sources)

regards,

Tlowk