Troubleshooting

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Permission denied

If you try to connect to a mote and receive a permission error, you may need to add yourself to the dialout group. The error may look something like the following:

/home/user/contiki/tools/sky/serialdump-linux -b115200 /dev/ttyUSB0
connecting to /dev/ttyUSB0 (115200)
/dev/ttyUSB0: Permission denied
make: *** [login] Error 255

Trying the following command which should give the desired output

 make TARGET=sky sky-motelist 

(sky can be replaced by the mote which is being used e.g z1)

The desired output

 ../../tools/sky/motelist-linux 
 Reference  Device           Description 
 ---------- ---------------- --------------------------------------------- 
 M4A7J5HF   /dev/ttyUSB0     Moteiv tmote sky 

This means it is a common serial port connection problem with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

To resolve the issue do the following.

 sudo apt-get remove modemmanager
 sudo adduser $USER dialout (or)
 sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER // adds the user to the dialout
 // replace $USER by the username
 sudo reboot
 id -Gn

And check now if the device is attached to the dialout user group.

 ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0
 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 0 Mar  5 19:58 /dev/ttyUSB0 

There is no need to mess with dev rules or permissions.

Issue with make login

If you are trying to execute the serial-dump application (contiki/tools/sky/serialdump-linux) and see the message: "No such file or directory" or "Command not found", it means that you are running in a 64-bit operating system that does not have proper 32-bit libraries installed. Since serialdump-linux is a pre-compiled 32-bit tool you need to execute the following command to install the necessary libraries:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

If the above does not work

Then, try few commands like:

 ldd serialdump-linux

The output look similar to the following:

 ldd serialdump-linux
       linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf772d000)
       libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf75b4000)
       /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf772e000)

Then it means that you have to install 32-bit packages. Remember to add i386 architecture or you won't be able to install 32-bit packages:

 sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install ia32-libs