efax - SOLVED

[Robert Story <y2kbug@ms25.hinet.net>]

> I'm trying to use efax to receive faxes. I've read the man page and it
> seems reasonably clear enough.
> 
> However, I'm only able to get efax to work if I'm root. As an
> individual user, this is what I get when I try to put the fax modem
> into receive mode:
> 
>   bob@sonic:~$ efax -d /dev/ttyS0
>   efax: Fri Nov  7 07:46:18 2003 efax v 0.9a-001114 Copyright 1999 Ed Casas
>   efax: Fri Nov  7 07:46:18 2003 efax v 0.9a-001114 Copyright 1999 Ed Casas
>   efax: 46:18 compiled Apr  7 2003 16:44:31
>   efax: 46:18 Error: can't open serial port /dev/ttyS0: Permission denied
>   efax: 46:18 done, returning 2 (unrecoverable error)

Thanks to those who replied. User bob was already a member of group dialout. However, the problem was that /dev/ttyS0 had permissions set to 600 - I had to reset this to 660 and then it worked.

There was another problem, also now solved. I wanted to use the nice user-friendly front end to efax, which is efax-gtk. The problem is that efax always defaults to /dev/ttyS1, and my computer only has one serial port, /dev/ttyS0. You can override the default on the command line with the -d option, but no way to do that in the graphic mode. I solved this by moving /dev/ttyS1 to a bogus name, and created a symbolic link, as follows:

  root@sonic:mv /dev/ttyS1 /dev/ttyS1-x
  root@sonic:ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/ttyS1

This is the result:

  root@sonic:/dev# ls -l ttyS*
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  64 Nov  7 09:37 ttyS0
  lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           10 Nov  7 09:35 ttyS1 -> /dev/ttyS0
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  65 Jul 14 12:05 ttyS1-x
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  66 Jul 14 12:05 ttyS2
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  67 Jul 14 12:05 ttyS3
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  68 Jul 14 12:06 ttyS4
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  69 Jul 14 12:06 ttyS5
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  70 Jul 14 12:06 ttyS6
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  71 Jul 14 12:06 ttyS7
  crw-rw----    1 root     dialout    4,  72 Jul 14 12:06 ttyS8

And now it works.

regards,
Robert