Avian’s Blog

When developing embedded software, having a working serial terminal emulator is almost as important as having a working C compiler. So when working with VESNA I more or less have at least one instance of CuteCom running on my desktop at all times.

While CuteCom does its thing relatively well, the last version released by the original author (0.22.0) has a few minor annoyances that only get bigger with daily use:

• Program occasionally stops saving terminal settings,
• device drop-down history starts accumulating empty lines and
• input widgets are not disabled when serial port is opened in read-only mode.

Fortunately, all of these can be fixed with more or less trivial patches. Unfortunately, there has been zero response to these patches from the upstream author. I have also tried to reach the author of the Debian package via e-mail to ask him if he might include these patches in the version shipped by Debian. It has been now more than a year since these attempts at communication and I have yet to receive any response.

So basically, now I'm just throwing the whole thing into the wind and hoping that maybe, just maybe, at one point someone important will pick it up and I won't have to keep installing a locally-compiled version of this package on every machine I use.

You can get the Debian source package and amd64 binary for Wheezy. If you want to include these fixes in some other distribution of CuteCom (gasp!) I have also been kind enough to nicely package them separately for you.