Notice of Impending Serial Library change to rxtx

Background:

The use of the rxtx serial libraries from [www.rxtx.org] has had at least a little testing across a few machines now. They also work on Macintosh, for which Sun javax.comm is not available. So by using them we (a) gain Macintosh host capability and (b) avoid weird Sun licence restrictions on the javax.comm stuff. Well, we might actually also (c) gain Solaris compatibility -- anyone have a Sun workstation we can test that on? :-)

These rxtx libraries are a "drop in" replacement for the Sun javax.comm stuff, but they appear as gnu,io.* not javax.comm.*. For Reprap host software, this means a simple change to just five (5) consecutive lines in one file, Reprap/src/org/comms/snap/SNAPCommunicator.java -- just changing every occurrence of "import javax.comm." to "import gnu.io." (and recompiling your Reprap application, of course!) is all it takes.

Notice:

Unless someone tells me not to (!), I am planning to commit that change to use the rxtx libs to Subversion soon (maybe Monday or Tuesday this week). When I do, updating your host codebase *will* totally break your Reprap host software, *unless* you first install the rxtx libs.

I may have a more automated installer for them soonish, but for now it's a matter of downloading one .zip file, unzipping it and copying one .jar file and 2 .so files to the right places on your system (on Linux... similarly simple on other OSes I gather. A README file in the .zip has the instructions).

Action Needed:

You will need to install rxtx to use my almost-available packaged host software anyway, so... be prepared, if you use Reprap host software, please install those rxtx libs *now* :-)

I'm using the current 2.1.7-r2 release of rxtx, by the way.

If you feel this change is a bad idea, or should be delayed, speak up *now*, or it will be too late!

Jonathan

The change requiring rxtx libs has been committed (svn revision 620).

Look for reprap-host-0.8.jar or similar on SourceForge soon!

Jonathan

Change to instructions?

Done in RepRapLinuxSoftware right after I committed the change.

Others maintaining the Windows/Mac pages can get the idea from my changes to the Linux one (I hope!).

Jonathan