Dealing with Unix character devices?

ned konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Sat Aug 30 04:07:12 UTC 2003


Aaron J Reichow wrote:
> Ahoy!
> 
> I'm rather new to dealing with Unix serial/character devices in Squeak.
> Anyone have any tips to impart?  Can I just approach grabbing data via a
> /dev/* file with a regular FileStream, or do I need a) OSProcess or b)
> something else?
> 
> All I'm interested in is reading from the device, I don't need to write to
> it.  The specific device is /dev/ttyS0, the physical device is the IR
> port, and the purpose of this is to read codes from the IrDA keyboard I
> have.  The Qtopia driver doesn't seem to interact well with the Squeak VM,
> so I thought I'd try my hand at writing a driver that has no underlying
> dependencies beyond some serial access.

John McIntosh has done a ground-up version of a Serial Plugin for Unix. However, 
it needs to be made to work with Linux (he was concentrating on MacOS/X).

I have started that work, but don't know when I'll get to the rest of it.

The work is simple, and (I think) would be best done by taking a number of 
manifest constants that are derived from the termios.h header file and putting 
them back into C so we don't have to copy the header into individual methods in 
Squeak for every platform.

Also, the API differences will have to be dealt with.




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