Setting Up Arduino Uno IDE on Ubuntu

As far I see you are using the version 1.0.5 of arduino IDE, I assume that you installed the one in the apt repositories.

You can either try to install one from the snapcraft or the one from arduino's website.

Personally I used the latter one and anything worked like a charm.

Also either the case you can try to loon on Tools->Port if exists a port that is not a /dev/ttyS0 one. Try to play with these options. Finally by searching on dmesg you can find out which port has been located for arduno as well.

Finally an another approach is to unplug your arduino plug it again and type the following command:

dmesg | tail

In order to record the last event as the one that happens when arduino is plugged in to a usb port. The command above will show you the correct port.

For better results you can use the following:

  dmesg | tail -f

And continioulsy plug and unplug the arduino from the usp port till you see any arduino related message. The -f parameter allows to show realtime the new logs.


COM1 is a Windows(TM) designation - it will look like /dev/ttyACM0, /dev/ttyUSB0 or similar in Linux.

Greyed out port tends to mean you haven't set the board type first - go through the settings in arduino Tools menu & set board to 'Uno', you should see the 'port' enable & auto-fill as well, most likely.


Your user account probably doesn't have permission to use the serial port.

Two ways to address this:

  • Easiest, but not advised: Run the Arduino IDE as root (eg launch from the command line using sudo).
  • The second, more advisable way to do it is to add your user to the dialout group, which has permission to use the serial port. Use the command sudo adduser $USER dialout. You will need to log out then log back in for it to take effect though (or try this). To list groups of current user use groups or id -Gn.

Once this is done, when you select the correct serial port (as others have mentioned maybe /dev/ttyUSB0) you should be able to write, allowing you to program the Arduino.