serial communication problem with 1.4.0.7

[Damien Moore <damien@dataconduction.com>]

I have been using DOSemu in conjunction with Debian versions 5, 6 and 7,
together with a number of different physical computers, and have found
it very useful indeed. It provides me with the ability to back up a
hand-held device via a serial cable and proprietary program written for
MS-DOS. With all of these setups I have installed the version of DOSemu
from the Debian repository. In all cases I have found it sufficient to
insert one of the following lines in /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf in order to
identify the serial port.
$_com1 = "/dev/ttyS0"
$_com1 = "/dev/ttyUSB0"
From this you can see that I have used both inbuilt serial ports (ie on
the motherboard) as well as USB serial port adapters. The only other
modification necessary has been to use one of the following commands in
order to gain access to the serial port.
chmod 666 /dev/ttyS0
chmod 666 /dev/ttyUSB0

Recently I bought a new computer and installed Debian version 8,
together with DOSemu 1.4.0.7 from the standard repository. I made the
usual adjustments as above. The emulation started and ran normally but
serial communication failed. I tried the USB adapter in place of the
motherboad COM port, but to no avail. I tested the connecting hardware
using a different computer running Debian 7 and all was in working
order. I solved the problem by using an older repository and forcing the
installation of DOSemu version 1.4.0.1, after which everthing worked
normally.

I thought it might be helpful to let you know.