Won't have time until this evening to play with it.
Probably don't have the group memeberships correct yet. Evidently don't have a dialout group. Will fix.
Using Ubuntu 16.10 from a lubuntu distro.
Will try the D2XX lib as you suggested for debugging purposes. I had downloaded and initially tried it with the first attempt you posted. Was glad to see the port to libftdi since D2XX requires rmmod of ftdio_sio which breaks internet and lots of stuff on the netbook.