I actually have a serial tool, an AVRT5 APRS amateur radio GPRS tracker. It is made in China and poorly documented.
To configure this device there is a Windows software written it seems in visual primary that genuinely sends and reads the configuration by serial port. The device comes with a Prolific USB serial converter. The software turned into no more hard to run below Wine than Windows (both needed downloading DLL and OCX documents and registering them).
The problem got here whilst I tried to opposite engineer the configuration protocol. Under Linux ordinarily, that might be easy. I attempted all the standard equipment and a few uncommon ones too. Here are a few examples
socat
strace
slsnif https://linux.Die.Net/man/1/slsnif
jpnevulator, http://jpnevulator.Snarl.Nl/
For some of them I made a virtual serial port and mapped that to COM3 on wine.
(I also used WireShark that could intercept USB visitors and that worked best however I didn't apprehend the output, perhaps there were a number of manage bytes for the USB now not simply serial data)
All had the identical problem (except WireShark). As soon as the sniffer became energetic the config software could not speak with the tool. I could intercept the command "SETUP" coming from the software however the tool did now not reply
Then I attempted home windows port sniffer Serial Port Monitor https://www.serial-port-monitor.org/ (unfastened trial version)
This said it couldn't find a serial port.
So in the end I tried a Windows 7 laptop and Serial Port Monitor labored beautifully. It turned out the config application opened the port on 9600 N81 and despatched simple and obvious ASCII strings with a 0xD 0xA termination.
But why should I no longer get it to work below Wine whilst a lot of these techniques work first-rate for everyday Linux programs?