minicom help?

Downloaded and installed minicom from either macports or fink (forget which). Seems to work okay, so long as I run it as root ( sudo minicom) from an admin-privileged account. I want to run it in Terminal.app to talk to an "old-school" packet radio modem when logged into a non-privileged user account. But when I type minicom and press <return>, I get an error message back saying Cannot create lockfile. Sorry. Same thing happens from an admin-privileged account if I don't preface the minicom directive with sudo. What do I need to do in order to run minicom in Terminal.app while logged in as a non-privileged user?

As a quasi-related question, I have a Keyspan SXPro serial 4-port PCI card. There are multiple packet radio modems. Can I save a "config" file so when launching minicom I can bring up the proper serial port more or less automagically, depending on which packet radio modem I want to talk to? Can I launch multiple Terminal windows simultaneously, in order to launch minicom, each Terminal window associated with a different serial port? That's pretty much where I'm going with this second question...