[Techtalk] connecting a dumb terminal

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 09:29:20PM -0400 or thereabouts, Katie Bechtold wrote:
> Hi!  I just picked up a portable dumb terminal, brand Informer and
> model 207, that I'd like to connect to my RedHat 7.2 box.  I
> connected it to COM2 (ttyS1) with a crossover cable.  I added the
> following line to my /etc/inittab:
> t1:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 1200 ttyS1 vt100
[... and it no work...]
> I was told that this is a VT100 terminal.  However, a message I read
> at http://www.classiccmp.org/mail-archive/classiccmp/2000-03/0159.html
> has planted a kernel of doubt in my mind, so I tried specifying
> other terminal types, including ibm327x, with the same results as
> with vt100.

I remember having troubles with my serial terminal which resulted
in my pasting about 20 lines of notes and comments into inittab.
Alas, somewhere along the line, they got "tidied", which is no
use to me now. It is a vt220 and my current inittab doesn't actually 
mention the terminal type, and it doesn't bother with the -L. It
appears to work, though. 

# Here we go... 12/09/01
S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 9600

man agetty says, 
       Depending  on how the program was configured, all diagnos-
       tics are written to the console device or reported via the
       syslog(3)  facility. 

So: anything in there?