Serial Terminals

[DefconAlpha]

Hey guys... I am wanting to get a serial terminal set up on my various gentoo machines sitting around because i have no usable monitors to spare, but i have craploads of terminals (mainly adp 508mt's, but we can use vt220 as a good emulation) These terminals were/are set up to have the cable run through a straight cat3 cable and have the little rj-45 to db9 adapters on them.

I have tried using FreeBSD and Gentoo, with similar results (yay, nothing!) Does anyone have an idea as to how to configure the console to "show up" on the terminal? I have booted with a console=ttyS0,9600n8 to no avail. I have tried both serial ports, manually running getty on the serial port (always said the port was already in use). What about the cables? Do i *have* to use a null-modem cable since i am not using a multi-port card? (i do have one of those, btw) does cat5 cabling work too?

arrrgh. stupid terminals. if anyone has any ideas as to how to make a terminal work, i would love it :)
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[SmegTheLight]

I am using serial consoles here (I use a Palm III as a terminal for embedded x86 machines).

Some things to check..

- There was a problem with the gentoo-sources kernel awhile back related to compiling with -O3 that prevented the serial console feature from working. I think it has been fixed now. (I can't find the bug and forum posts on it any more - Pruned ?)

- Make sure your kernel actually has Serial Console compiled in

- Use a Null modem cable/adaptor, and try connecting from another CPU via Minicom. That will at least confirm if it's your terminals or your setup.

- Try setting up grub to use the serial port - That will test out before it even hits the linux kernel. http://www.rajeevnet.com/linux/grub_serial_console.html

If it works from minicom on the other machine, then it must be something with the terminal. Hook it directly up to the machine with minicom and verify that you can at least send text stright to it. Perhaps its 7bit ?, etc..

You should see all the kernel messages if it works. After that, add getty lines to your inittab for your serial port.