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


Make the Arduino reference locally available
--------------------------------------------

The Arduino Language reference isn't currently packaged within the arduino
package, thus you will see a error message if you try open it from the menu
Help -> Reference.
The HTML files of the reference using a lot of references and resources to other
sides (like fonts, CSS or Javascript) on the internet these are all privacy
breaches from a POV of Debian.

In order to make the Arduino Language reference callable from the IDE you can
do the following steps that will download an archived version of the reference,
extract the content and move that in place. You will need to have root access
or sudo rights for the move of the extracted content!

1. Download the archived content of the reference.

  wget -P ~/Downloads https://downloads.arduino.cc/reference-1.6.6-3.zip

2. Extract the content.

  unzip ~/Downloads/reference-1.6.6-3.zip -d /tmp/reference

3. Move the extracted reference.

  # become root
  mv -f /tmp/reference/* /usr/share/arduino/reference
  # or if you are in the sudo group
  sudo mv /tmp/reference/* /usr/share/arduino/reference
  # remove used folder where content was extracted to (not fully needed)
  rmdir /tmp/reference

Please note that the content of the archive is missing some parts like used web
fonts and thus the website is looking not fully equal to the upstream version.
You will always find the current version of the reference online on

  https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en