August 16, 2012

Installing the software is easy:

yum install arduino

The next thing to do is to add myself to the lock and dialout groups by adding my user name to the end of those lines in /etc/group. After doing this, I must logout and back in again for the addition to take effect. I was pulling my hair out wondering why I was getting the "no permission to create lock file" until I realized the business of logging out and in was needed.

After this, launch the arduino gui (which I do by typing ./arduino) and be sure and use Tools->Board and Tools->Port to specify which arduino board and USB serial device you are working with. The USB device is a bit "ephemeral". It doesn't appear until you plug in the USB cable and sometimes it changes for no apparent reason. Use dmesg to see what happens when you plug in the arduino cable. In my case it is either /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 depending on what kind of mood my computer is in.

I always get these stupid errors, but they don't seem to matter:

Error parsing gtk-icon-sizes string: ''
WARNING:  RXTX Version mismatch
	Jar version = RXTX-2.2
	native lib Version = RXTX-2.2pre2

Things seem to work.