COM1 (DOS) port under DOSMerge : How to get it to work?

[Michael Grenier]

>From article <443 at cosi.UUCP>, by bill at cosi.UUCP (Bill Michaelson):
~ In article <11109 at ut-emx.UUCP>, mike at ut-emx.UUCP (Mike O'Donnell) writes:
~ ] We have a CompuAdd 386/20 running uport SYS V and DOSMerge.  I would
~ ] like to be able to run the PC version of kermit using the unix 
~ ] /dev/tty00 port.  I have tried everything in the DOSMerge book and
~ ] nothing seems to work.  Either I am missing something or it just 
~ ] doesn't work.
~ 
~ Don't bother trying.  I tried it.  It doesn't work.  Microport knows
~ it.  They don't care.  Or should I say, they didn't care.  Now they
~ don't exist, from what I've been hearing.
~ -- 


Hold on there.... 
    MSKERMIT talks right to the hardware so obviously is won't work
with /dev/tty00. You might take a crack at the generic DOS interface in 
kermit but the DOS BIOS handles input from serial devices in a strange
way... .i.e the BIOS will NOT wait for input for any great length
of time before timing out which is a feature used by the ctty command
within COMMAND.COM   This feature allows MSKERMIT to regain control
and have non received packets time out properly. UNIX devices do
not have the problem and will properly wait on the read until the
read is satisfied unless the NDELAY ioctl flag is set which doesn't
seem to exist for DOS and thus MSKERMIT does not use it.

   You might argue that using the assign device interface into DOS
MERGE might be the answer...Communications programs have been know
to work this way. Could you guys be more specific in what you tried?

    -Mike Grenier
     mike at cimcor.mn.org