Installing and using Minicom

Minicom is a program for using the serial port (COM) in Linux operating systems.

Installing in Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install minicom

Run:

minicom

Or:

sudo minicom

After launch, you need to open the configuration by pressing CTRL-A O and specify the name of the COM port, usually ttyS0 – COM1, ttyS1 – COM2, USB-RS232 adapter – ttyUSB0.

The list of devices can be viewed with the commands:

dmesg | grep tty
ls -l /dev/tty*

I will describe some keyboard shortcuts:
Help: CTRL-A Z
Configuration: CTRL-A O
Modem Initialization: CTRL-A M
Output: CTRL-A Q

If the error “Device /dev/tty … access failed: Permission denied” is written at startup, this means that the user from which minicom is started does not have access rights to the device. You can see who has access with the “ls -l /dev/tty..” command, usually the root user and the dialout group have access. In order not to run minicom as root, you can add any necessary user to the dialout group with the command:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout USERNAME

See also my articles:
Minicom error solution “Device /dev/ttyS0 is locked”
How to transfer a file via XMODEM using Minicom

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Discover more from IT Blog

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading