The RXTX library is an open source implementation of the Java Communications API. Its latest version can be retrieved from from the RXTX projects home page. Unfortunately it seems that the library has not been maintained or updated since a couple of years.
The aim of this port is to modernize the build and configuration framework to are more recent version of the GNU autotools build system. The original RXTX library incorporates configuration scripts from the GNOME project instead which might be especially disadvantegous when it comes to crosscompiling the library to an embedded target e.g. an ARM based linux distribution (Open Embedded / Yocto build system).
This new build approach requires the precense of an underlying POSIX compatible OS. Under Windows cygwin/MinGW must be used but the build has been exclusively tested on Linux and Mac OS X.
You need to have Java Development Kit, OpenJDK or SunJDK, installed on your machine. Furthermore the GNU-C compiler, autoconf, automake and libtool must be present as well. Most Linux distros come with these software either preinstalled or there are corresponding installation packages available. Under Mac OS X refering to the homebrew build and packaging system which seems to be most straigt forward way of compiling GNU software.
The build configuration needs the environment variable JDK_HOME appropriately defined. Since JDK_HOME is undefined on many OSes by default even when a JDK is present, autoconf will try its best to determine the JDK_HOME by incorporating a Java based test application. Except crosscompiling this apporach shall work for the majority of the cases.
As first step the configure script needs to be generated by the following autconf command:
autoreconf -i
Configuration and compilation of the libarary is done by the following commands afterwards:
./configure
make
sudo make install
By default the native library librxtxSerial.a and the java archive RXTXcomm.jar are installed to the directory /usr/local/lib and symbolics links to these files are created within the JDK's extension folder which is by default in the search path for JNI and JAR libaries.
This software is distributed under the terms of the LGPL v 2.1 + Linking Over Controlled Interface as the original RXTX Library.
2015, Otto Linnemann