Arduino software with 'serial port' greyed out

[Bazu135]

I'm trying to help a friend with his laptop - he has installed Arduino software on it, and is trying to configure the serial port. However, when he attempts to access the serial port configuration in the GUI, the menu 'Serial Ports' option is greyed out. I thought that maybe there was an access rights issue, and so added his user to the 'dialout' and 'lock' groups as recommended in this thread, but this hasn't resolved the issue, even after a reboot.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might resolve this issue? I realise this is absolutely minimal information, but I have no idea where to begin!

[RupertPupkin]

Check the output of the command "ls -l /dev/ttyS*" in a terminal. Mine shows this:

$ ls -l /dev/ttyS*
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Oct 28 16:24 /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 Oct 28 16:24 /dev/ttyS1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 66 Oct 28 16:24 /dev/ttyS2
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 Oct 28 16:24 /dev/ttyS3

If the user has been added to the dialout group then he should have access to the serial ports. If none of those devices show up then that means the kernel didn't detect them. Try checking the BIOS to make sure the serial ports are enabled.