[Techtalk] connecting a dumb terminal

[Jeff Dike]

katie at katie-and-rob.org said:
> But the wrong characters (or no characters) appear on the terminal
> when I type on the terminal's keyboard or do a "echo test > /dev/
> ttyS1" on my PC.  No login prompt appears at any time on the terminal.
>  To be specific, sometimes a "}" character appears when I press enter
> on the terminal's keyboard; sometimes nothing appears. When I do "echo
> test > /dev/ttyS1", sometimes "x~x`" appears; sometimes nothing
> appears.  Does anyone have troubleshooting advice?

One suggestion -
	Make sure the baud rates match.  The terminal should have some
kind of setup where you can set its idea of the baud rate.  Make sure that
matches whatever rate you're putting on the agetty command line.

Another thing you might look at is a different getty.  This is a longer
shot since the agetty man page says that it's suitable for fixed lines.

When I was setting up a serial line console, I had the same sort of 
symptoms until I noticed a little statement in the mingetty manpage saying
it wasn't suitable for serial lines.  (And I'm looking at it again, and
it says "Unlike agetty(8), mingetty  is  not  suitable  for  serial lines.  
I recommend using mgetty(8) for this purpose."). 

So, if you're totally out of ideas, you might give mgetty a shot.

				Jeff