From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (qmail 10980 invoked from network); 27 Nov 1996 22:08:26 -0000 Received: from Ocean.CAM.ORG (nico@198.168.100.5) by mail2.redhat.com with SMTP; 27 Nov 1996 22:08:24 -0000 Received: from localhost (nico@localhost) by Ocean.CAM.ORG (8.8.2/8.8.2) with SMTP id RAA23939; Wed, 27 Nov 1996 17:08:05 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: Ocean.CAM.ORG: nico owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 17:08:03 -0500 (EST) From: Nicolas Pitre To: Nikhil Nair cc: blinux-list@redhat.com, linux-access@ssv1.union.utah.edu Subject: Re: Debian installation - interested? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII List-Id: On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, Nikhil Nair wrote: [...] > So what I'd like to know from you all is: what do you think would be most > useful? Presumably many people don't have DecTalks, but do many have > second machines to use as serial terminals? If having a serial terminal > installation procedure would be useful, should there be a choice of which > com port to use? How should this be selected - would separate rootdisks > be needed, or would a simple choice on the main keyboard (say pressing 1 > or 2) be OK? What I think is best is to have a rootdisk wich starts a getty on both COM1 and COM2. It is also best to have a dumb terminal installation script (easier to track with a screen review software). It could be set on a separate rootdisk or just make the serial port login active on an already existing rootdisk... But since COM1 and COM2 are driven with a getty, the terminal could then be attached to any of those two without having to make a selection. I think it's also possible to configure lilo to redirect its I/O to a comm port (in 9600 bauds). A bootdisk could be set up with this so the installation even from the boot time could be controlled and monitored from an external terminal wich could be an extra PC with any kind of access software. It's even possible to get boot time messages on the serial port just by defining a simbolic link like /dev/console --> /dev/ttyS0... > Nikhil Nair > Trinity College, Cambridge, England > Tel.: +44 1223 368353 > Email: nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk > nnair@debian.org nico@cam.org Nicolas Pitre ing. stag.