WINE 2.8 in May 2017 brought a new method of accessing serial and parallel ports. No longer does one need to manually create softlinks for serial ports in WINE. WINE creates serial port softlinks (and overwrites manually set softlinks) automatically.

Serial port mapping in WINE ≥ 2.8 are managed via

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wine regedit

Be sure to include the WINEPREFIX you’re actually using (default is ~/.wine)

Which WINE serial port to use: find the WINE serial port corresponding to the Linux serial port device name by watch log output from:

dmesg -w

when plugging in the serial ↔ USB adapter.

Using WINEPREFIX, start the WINE registry editor:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wine regedit

Configure the port–if the device is seen at /dev/ttyUSB0, and you want it to appear to WINE on COM1, edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wine\Ports to have a new string entry named COM1 with value /dev/ttyUSB0.

Verify this setting (but do not edit) by:

ls ~/.wine/dosdevices

where again ~/.wine is the location of your WINEPREFIX.