Permissions required for access to USB/Serial ports:
----------------------------------------------------

User must be in the dialout group in order to write to USB/Serial ports.

Fedora uses zenity to ask if a user wants to be added, but it is a big download.

I wrote our own java code, in debian/permission-checker, which will ask if the
user would like to be added, then runs a script with pkexec to add the user
to the dialout group.

--Scott Howard <showard@debian.org>, Dec 12, 2011





Note for non-reparenting window manager users
---------------------------------------------

If you are using a non-reparenting window manager, such as ratpoison, awesome
or dwm, some Java graphical applications using the AWT toolkit will only
display empty grey windows, as described in bug #508650.

There are two solutions to work around this issue:
1. mask your window manager as one of the non-reparenting ones supported by AWT,
  using the wmname <http://tools.suckless.org/wmname> tool from the dwm-tools
  package:
  $ wmname LG3D
2. set the environment variable _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING:
  $ export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=true

You can automate these tasks by writing them to your ~/.xsessionrc:
$ echo export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=true >> ~/.xsessionrc