• I use debian Linux (jessie) on a lenovo amd64 notebook
• the minicom configuration file handling is not intuitive
• I recommend writing the config file by hand (see below) although it is explicitly mentioned not to do this in the config file.
• I recommend to use the path in the home directory (see below)
• this is tested only a few (no need to)
• I never use minicom -s as root or with sudo
• dpkg -i has to be called as root
• I'm no Debian package maintainer - I just wanted to load the newline delay automatically
• the vt_nldelay parameter is not automatically written by minicom. It has to be done by hand.
• there is no command line option to set the nl_delay from the shell

Tired of always "C-a t d 20" in working with minicom and curious about how to build a debian package I gave a try to add a patch to the minicom sources in order to load it the newline delay parameter from the config file.

Here is what I've done with the source package.

mkdir minicom
cd minicom
apt-get source minicom
cd minicom-2.7
quilt new nl_delay-to-config
cd src
quilt add configsym.h minicom.c rwconf.c
# change sources
quilt refresh
quilt header -e
# <describe patch>
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

This gave a ready to use minicom_2.7-1_amd64.deb file.

After

dpkg -i ./minicom_2.7-1_amd64.deb

you have to create or MANUALLY change the configuration file.

Here is my .minirc.tachyon which has to be changed manually(!) to your needs.

cat ~/.minirc.tachyon

# Machine-generated file - use "minicom -s" to change parameters.
pu port             /dev/ttyUSB0
pu baudrate         115200
pu rtscts           No
pu mfcolor          YELLOW
pu mbcolor          BLUE
pu tfcolor          GREEN
pu vt_nl_delay      20

I generally start via command

minicom -c on tachyon

The 20 ms newline delay is automatically added. Such an effort for such a little feature