Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Some time ago, I posted these instructions for compiling Minicom, a terminal application that enables your Mac to communicate with serial devices, much the same way Hyperterm does in Windows. Some months after the original posting, Tiger was released, and the instructions I had provided for compiling Minicom on what was then Panther were no longer valid. I’m not a developer and I can just barely muddle my way through this compiling stuff, so I was at a loss to compile a Tiger-comaptible Minicom executable.

In the meantime, I used Zterm. It’s a decent app, but it hasn’t been updated in some time, and I have no idea whether it will work with Rosetta on Intel-based Macs. Because of those factors, I can’t recommend it. Minicom can be installed with the help of Darwin Ports or Fink, but that’s a lot of overhead and trouble for this little app, and frankly, I’ve had both packaging systems fail on my machines within minutes of their initial setup. I don’t trust either of them.

This morning, compiling Minicom on Tiger came back to my mind, and I used our trusty friend Google to see if anyone else had done it yet. I came across this handy page by Mr. Jeffrey Frey which contains - you’re not gonna believe this - an OS X package installer for Minicom!

Minicom 2.1-14 package installer for OS X ( 334 KB, Universal )

If you find this package helpful, take a moment to thank Jeffrey for it.

Knowing that Jeffrey had successfully compiled Minicom on Tiger, I e-mailed him to get the details, which he graciously shared. So for those of you who want to compile Minicom from source, the instructions are as follows:

Start /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and change to the Desktop folder.
cd Desktop

Download the Minicom sourcecode.

curl -O http://alioth.debian.org/download.php/123/minicom-2.1.tar.gz

Un-gzip and un-tar the downloaded file.

tar zxvf minicom-2.1.tar.gz

Minicom needs a folder that doesn’t exist by default to store some temporary working files. Let’s create it.

sudo mkdir -p /var/spool/lock

Set that newly created folder to be writable by everyone.

sudo chmod 777 /var/spool/lock/

Change to the src subfolder in the uncompressed minicom-2.1 folder.

cd minicom-2.1/src

In order for Minicom to compile correctly, we have to make changes to a file. Rename that file, because we’re going to replace it.

mv window.c window.c.original

Find all the instances of “BC” in the file windows.c.original and replace them with “Minicom_BC”. Write everything to a new file named window.c.

sed 's/BC/Minicom_BC/g' window.c.original > window.c

Move up one folder level.

cd ..

Configure Minicom for compiling, and specify our recently created folder for some temporary working files.

./configure --enable-lock-dir=/var/spool/lock

Compile Minicom.

make

Install it.

sudo make install

You can safely delete the files and folders containing the source. The Minicom executable is located in /usr/local/bin.

Jeff also provides a script to patch the source and build a universal binary.

For more information about using Minicom once you’ve compiled and installed it, refer to the previous Minicom article, which I’ve linked at the top.