Serial HOWTO: Other Sources of Information

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23. Other Sources of Information

23.1 Books

Axleson, Jan: Serial Port Complete, Lakeview Research, Madison, WI, 1998.
Black, Uyless D.: Physical Layer Interfaces & Protocols, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1996.
Campbell, Joe: The RS-232 Solution, 2nd ed., Sybex, 1982.
Campbell, Joe: C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications, 2nd ed., Unknown Publisher, 1993.
Levine, Donald: POSIX Programmer's Guide, O'Reilly, 1991.
Nelson, Mark: Serial Communications Developer's Guide, 2nd ed., Hungry Minds, 2000.
Putnam, Byron W.: RS-232 Simplified, Prentice Hall, 1987.
Seyer, Martin D.: RS-232 Made Easy, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 1991.
Stevens, Richard W.: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, (ISBN 0-201-56317-7; Addison-Wesley)
Tischert, Michael & Bruno Jennrich: PC Intern, Abacus 1996. Chapter 7: Serial Ports

Notes re books:

"... Complete" has hardware details (including register) but the programming aspect is Window oriented.
"Physical Layer ..." covers much more than just EIA-232.

It's best to use the nearest mirror site, but here's the main sites:
Serial Software for Linux software for the serial ports including getty and port monitors.
Serial Communications for communication programs.

irqtune will give serial port interrupts higher priority to improve performance. Using hdparm for hard-disk tuning may help some more.
modemstat and statserial show the current state of various modem control lines. See Serial Monitoring/Diagnostics

23.3 Related Linux Documents

man pages for: setserial and stty
Low-Level Terminal Interface part of "GNU C Library Reference manual" (in libc (or glibc) docs package). It covers the detailed meaning of "stty" commands, etc.
Modem-HOWTO: modems on the serial port
PPP-HOWTO: help with PPP (using a modem on the serial port)
Printing-HOWTO: for setting up a serial printer
Serial-Programming-HOWTO: for some aspects of serial-port programming
Text-Terminal-HOWTO: how they work and how to install and configure
UPS-HOWTO: setting up UPS sensors connected to your serial port
UUCP-HOWTO: for information on setting up UUCP

23.4 Usenet newsgroups:

comp.os.linux.answers
comp.os.linux.hardware: Hardware compatibility with the Linux operating system.
comp.os.linux.networking: Networking and communications under Linux.
comp.os.linux.setup: Linux installation and system administration.

23.5 Serial Mailing List

The Linux serial mailing list. To join, send email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org, with ``subscribe linux-serial'' in the message body. If you send ``help'' in the message body, you get a help message. The server also serves many other Linux lists. Send the ``lists'' command for a list of mailing lists.

23.6 Internet

Linux Serial Driver home page Includes info about PCI support.
Serial Suite by Vern Hoxie (site is dead in 2004) is a collection of blurbs about the care and feeding of the Linux serial port plus some simple programs. He also has a Serial-Programming-HOWTO (not yet available from the Linux Documentation Project). Your browser should automatically log you in but if you do it manually login as "anonymous" and use your full e-mail address as the password.
A white paper discussing serial communications and multiport serial boards was available from Cyclades at http://www.cyclades.com.