Usb To Serial In Playonlinux

There’s a serial terminal I like (hardware group’s Hercules terminal), which as far as I know is only available for Windows. Play On Linux makes wine easy to use. Wine makes it possibly possible to run windows applications. Play On Linux can be installed through the app store or command line easy enough.

sudo apt install playonlinux

Open the Play On Linux application. The GUI is easy to use and has lots of preconfigured options for installing built-for-windows applications/games. The Hercules terminal isn’t in that list, but there’s an option to install a non-listed program and the GUI guides you through the creating a new Wineprefix or using and existing Wineprefix. Hercules terminal is a stand alone exe, just move the exe to the new Wineprefix.

After the Hercules terminal is installed, the application opens, but it cant open a com port, permission denied.

When using serial terminal application, whether its run through Wine or not, the non-root user needs permissions. First thing is to add user to dialout group. Why dialout group? Maybe some legacy name used when serial modems were popular, and would dial out over a phone line.

Check if you’re already in a group with

groups

If dialout isn’t in that list, then add it with

sudo adduser $USER dialout

After adding a new group to the user, logout and login again.

Now the application needs to be able to find the USB to serial port. All the Com port options in the HWG Hercules are Com#, there isn’t a ttyUSB option, so a symbolic link is needed here.

ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/PlayOnLinux\'s\ virtual\ drives/'win_env'/dosdevices/com3

Where ‘win_env’ is the name of the Play On Linux windows environment name. This line can be added to Play On Linux configuration. Open the Play On Linux configuration, select the application, open Miscellaneous tab and add the above line with the appropriate Play On Linux environment path.

Update

A native alternative to Hercules terminal is moserial. It is a serial terminal only, if I need a tcp or udp terminal I still use Hercules terminal.

sudo apt install moserial