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John Galt · 12-22-2019, 04:01 AM

Ha, no worries. My problems were entirely self-inflicted because I had no idea /dev/ttyUSB0 would be created automatically.

The USB to serial device probably wasn't connected, therefore /dev/ttyUSB0 wasn't present, and I felt compelled to create it with sudo. All of that was totally unnecessary. I was expecting things to be difficult, and I made it so!

Claudio set me straight, which piqued my curiosity: In addition to the Prolific device and homemade cable / connector I had been using, I also had a USB to serial converter on the shelf that I never used before: a Keyspan / Tripp-Lite USA-19HS which I believe is an FTDI-based device. I plugged it in and did nothing else. Much to my amazement, Linux also detected it automatically, and MySamBa sent the file to the WP-34s just as easily.

The only difference between my original question four years ago and now is that I'm using a Mac running Linux natively, which runs slightly faster than it does in emulation. VirtualBox has a convenient icon indicating USB activity whereas the native Linux system doesn't, so there had always been a question in my mind about how device drivers interact with hardware. Did I need to install macOS drivers? Windows drivers? Was it even communicating with the device? I had no idea. As it turns out I didn't need to install any device drivers, Windows or otherwise. Linux just works. All I had to do was let it.

Of course Windows / PCs complicate matters with "com ports" that exist only in its world. My only remaining question is what to do about that inconveniently named "com33" port, which I probably exacerbated by deleting ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1. I suspect Wine created com33 automatically; I certainly didn't. Not a big deal though, now that I know where to look and what to expect. If necessary I can even install Wine all over again. Or Linux for that matter. It wasn't difficult; I just had to remember what I did long ago.

Thanks once again for everyone's help.