here s a weird and wacky problem i m currently out of the country with my trusty evo nNUMBERc laptop when i tried to use the serial port to talk to my mobile phone linux behaved pretty much as if the port was fried bizarre i thought because i d used it successfully while in the office the only difference was that i was trying the thing in the hotel i entertained brief notions of having somehow fried the serial drivers then rebooted the laptop to windows and tried again worked perfectly back to linux still not talking considered that it might be flaky power so i ran the laptop on battery nope tried moving the laptop to a differnet part of the room where there might be less bogon flux still not working eventually i gave up and used the irda port instead which is usually the serial connection of doom grief and teeth grinding this morning in the office the damn thing is working without a hitch anyone like to suggest what mystery technology is in use in the hotel that prevents serial ports from working under linux cheers waider waider URL yes it is very personal of me irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 