Arduino On Ubuntu 15.04

The Arduino Uno clone I picked up from a Chinese Ebay seller has a USB-to-serial adapter that lacks Mac support.  Well, there is a Mac driver.  But, I wasn't comfortable installing a driver whose download link (and installer, I think) was only in Chinese.

Luckily Linux has the driver built right in.  So, using my Ubuntu 15.04 laptop, I installed Arduino 1.0.5 from the default apt repositories.  First thing I found was that the "Tools->Serial Port" menu item was grayed out.  I added myself to the dialout group and logged out/into my X session (or run newgrp and then run arduino from the terminal).  I found that I could not save or open a file.  I was using Iced Tea java.  I pointed at java 7.x.  No luck.  Turns out, it depends on Java 6 runtime, still available in Oracle's archive area.

My son and I played with the blink example.  I'm so glad that little LED is built in!

Back to coding.  So long.