Comments interspersed below.

At 05:39 PM 12/19/02 -0800, Kache wrote:
Thank you for your help. Now I've kinda got off on a
tangent trying to control my LEAF through a terminal
that's connected via the null modem cable. I've been
trying to connect to the LEAF (which I should mention
is the latest standard Dachstien distro) through my
WindowsXP computer using HyperTerminal which I would
think would work.

I'm actually trying to remote control it like this
because the other computer (that doesn't do NICs) has
a defective video card so I would take out the video
card in the LEAF and put it in the other one if I
could HyperTerminal into it.

I've searched your archives and found a little bit of
useful information but a couple things are confusing
to me. For one in this how-to I found
(http://leaf.sourceforge.net/pub/doc/howto/LRP-Serial-HOWTO.txt)
the instructions say to test connection first issue
the command
echo "hello world" > /dev/ttyS0
which gave an error saying something about "cannot
create" and error 19.
First rule of error reporting: NEVER tell us that a message is "something like" or "something about" a result. Always quote error messages completely and exactly.

But if I do the same command
only like this:
echo "hello world" > /dev/ttyS00  (or 01)
I don't get any error messages. Of course the command
doesn't show up on the hyper terminal screen either.
Now why in world would this make a difference? Am I
really the first one to run into this?
Run "ls -l /dev/ttyS*" and verify that your serial-port devices are ttyS0 and ttyS1. Some variants switched to using ttyS00 and ttyS01, but I didn't think Dachstein had. Whichever way it is, using the right identifier will try to write the string "hello world" to the serial port, while the wrong one will try to create a file and write to that.

BTW, I'm assuming you are root when you try these things. If you aren't, please correct me.

My other question is about this line:
#T1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 19200 vt100

As per the mail archive messages I also was getting
message about respawning too fast. I figured 23 must
have something to do with time increment and since
numbers having to do with time always have 100 being
one second I changed 23 to higher number which fixed
the error message thing at least.
Wrong. "23" says to start this process if you are running at runlevel 2 or 3. I think Dachstein defaults to runlevel 3. So when you changed this number, you probably just told init not to run the process at all.

The respawn means that init tries to start the getty process on the serial device; the getty process exits; and init tries to start it again (and so on). You need to figure out why the getty process keeps exiting. Candidate reasons are (a) the device /dev/ttyS0 does not point to a working serial port and (b) the serial port itself works but is not connected properly to a remote terminal (either it is not connected at all, or the cable is not really a null-modem cable, or the cable doesn't handle handshaking properly (there are at leasst 3 different possible wirings for a "null-modem" cable that handle handshaking differently). Since these are hardware issues and we know next to nothing about your hardware, I can't actually troubleshoot this beyond giving you general advice.

During the boot/init process, watch for messages from the kernel about detecting serial ports (or check the kernel-message buffer with the "dmesg" command). This is the way to verify that the kernel is detecting your serial ports. It's been some time since I looked at Dachstein, so you may need to verify that either the kernel is compiled with serial-port support or you are running the necessary modules to add it in. My *guess* is that all of this is OK and you have a cabling problem ... but that is only a guess.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Or even just a few keywords to search for since I
can't seemt to find any how-tos that are detailed
enough. I don't know linux that well and many how-tos
seems to make assumptions on current knowledge.
[old stuff deleted]


--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski					-- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA			  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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