These RXTX files were just copied directly from the 0103 released of Processing. Their versions are reported as: Native lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7pre17 Java lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7pre17 If you've never used RXTX before on your Mac OS X box, run the command: % ./macosx_setup.command And then shutdown (not just log out) and log back in again. And read this faq from Processing: http://processing.org/faq/bugs.html#serial