Does anyone know of a way where I can use HyperTerminal in Windows to act as if I was sitting right in front of my Linux box. I was thinking of using a serial cable I have in order to communicate. The setup I want is to just have the Linux box running headless and be able to use HyperTerminal to act as the local terminal. If this is possible, would I have to have something compiled into the kernel for this to work?


--tarballedtux

It is possible, and to do it you need to tell one of the gettys (type man mingetty or man agetty or man mgetty) to use a serial line (ttyS?) as a terminal port instead of one of the virtual terminals (tty?). You should then be able to connect HT to that port with some fiddling.

Personally though, if the two computers are networked in any way, I would use SSH.

I know this is only a backup element. And it's easy enough to click on a preset HT icon than go through pageant and my passphrase. This doesn't make my local console disappear does it? I'd to still have them both available.


--tarballedtux

No, it shouldn't affect your local console. As far as the kernel is concerned, having a terminal running on ttyS? is no different to having one run on tty?. If you press <CTRL>+<ALT>+<Fn>, you'll find that you're already running at least 4 (normally 6, and then 7 is used for X) virtual terminals.

I think that it is potentially a good idea... it lets you have a 'hell, it doesn't work!' terminal to hand. I think there's a good HOWTO on using a Psion as a serial console on TLDP... and the principles should be the same.

Hope this helps.