I'm having problems installing RHEL on a rx1600 (itanium) server, it hasn't a video card and the "linux console=ttyS0" is not working. Anybody knows if this is a bug?. I worked fine with RHEL3 and Debian

it's the same with SLES9 SP1, maybe it has something to do with the 2.6 kernel.

I'm using RHEL4 on a P3 blade computer without a video card and I've added the following to the /boot/grub/grub.conf file at the end of the grub kernel specification:

kernel /vmlinux-<your-kernel-rev> root=LABEL=/ console=ttyS0,9600n8

which allows me to plug into the COM1 serial port and monitor the BIOS and boot strap and enter/edit grub commands. Once booted the serial console works just fine. I haven't had to use any other parameters.

Added functionality by attaching the serial port to a networked terminal server so I can get to the console from anywhere on the network. Avocent makes a nice one albeit a little pricey.