Question

I was playing around with a router earlier this evening using minicom and I must not have closed it cleanly. Here is the error message that I get when I try to open minicom:

device /dev/ttyusb0 lock failed: operation not permitted

I have two questions, 1) how would I go about getting out of this state, and 2) how do I exit minicom cleanly so that I can avoid this happening again.

Answer 1

I found I was able to fix the situation on my CentOS box by running minicom -S <device> -o and the do the normal exit key sequence (CTRL-a, x).

In your situation it would have been

sudo minicom -S ttyusb0 -o

This cleared the lock files minicom had placed in /var/lock/

Good luck
Ash