Fixing Arduino on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic x64 with librxtx-java

At present serial communication from the Arduino IDE will not work with the default installation as the IDE is supplied with a 32 bit version of the serial communication library rxtx and as yet the version in the repos doesn’t work either.

A full distribution of the arduino-0017 ide can be downloaded here with the correct files included.

If you haven’t used arduino before you’ll need to install its dependencies by running

sudo apt-get install avr-libc gcc-avr avrdude

To fix an existing installation - a working version of rxtx (rxtx-2.2pre2-bins.zip)  can be downloaded from http://rxtx.qbang.org/ however at the time of writing the site had been down for a while so I’ve provided a mirror of the file (here).

To install:

Extract /RXTXcomm.jar and /x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.xo into the ardunio/lib directory overwriting the previous versions.

Arduino serial communication should now work as normal.

For people having more general problems with any application using  librxtx-java on 64 bit ubuntu I have created an updated .deb file - available here. This can be also used to fix arduino if the librxtxSerial.so file is removed from the arduino/lib directory.

The source code for rxtx can be found here