On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 10:22:53AM -0500, Magnus Hedemark wrote: > On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Mike M wrote: > > > Was it a sparc or something that has a reasonable serial interface? If > > so then life will be much easier. It's the x86 archs that are > > non-trivial for serial consoles. > > The terminal, in my case, is a PC. The other end is usually, in my case, > a sparc. You have pretty full access to everything with a serial console > on a sparc (or most other non-PC platforms for that matter). On a PC, > unless you have special hardware, you can't get into it from the serial > port until the OS is up and even then it has to be specially configured to > give you a serial console. The non-x86 hardware gives you serial console > at a much lower level, such that you can send a BREAK to the OS and have a > boot PROM prompt.
I thought that with super-human powers you can load Linux on a x86 over COMx. Googling around doesn't support this possibility though. i Maybe if you had Busybox or a microdistro Linux running in a partition. This basic system can be modified to support serial console. Then you could use it to install a bigdistro Linux into another partition set, and mod LILO to default boot bigdistro the partition. I saw that LILO and GRUB will communicate over a serial port. It's like having a rescue disk partition always on the HDD. -- Mike Two hundred years ago, we note mischievously, the average American or European had a standard of living not very much superior to that of the average man in India or China. -- dailyreckoning.com -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
