Let me start by saying that I don't consider myself completely incompetent, but sometimes the simplest things confound me in Linux. I've been struggling with Linux and open source now for 4 years, and would love to leave the evil empire behind, but my inability to do the simplest things hang me up.

For example, I have an old IBM Thinkpad Model 600 that I managed to install Mandrake 8.1 on. All is well there, but I only need this machine to do 1 thing...communicate via modem or Com1 in a VT100 mode. Sounds like something Linux should do easily right out of the box, but I'm embarrased to say that I can't figure it out. Linux seems to recognize the internal modem and com ports, but don't know how to load/install/run the terminal emulator that will talk to them.

Thanks in advance for any assistance, as the answer is probably ridiculously simple (hence the newbie post!).

You don't want a "terminal emulator", that's for telnet/ssh.

For what you want to do, I use "minicom". There's also a program out there called "seyon" (I think) . There's a more powerful, but harder to use, one called Kermit.

Check out
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO.html#toc2

Thanks for the post...I was starting to think I wouldn't get any replies, and had actually found Minicom myself, installed the RPM, and ran it only to find that Mandrake didn't recognize either my Thinkpad's serial port or the internal modem. Found another post about an IBM utility (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/t...use_mirror=umn) that will configure the ports and stuff similar to the DOS version, but couldn't get it unpacked. Long story shorter, both modem and serial port are active, but Mandrake can't "see" them for some reason. Guess I'll have to figure out how/where to manually enter IRQ's, etc into some file somewhere...

I'm no closer to using the PC as I intended, but I sure am learning a lot along the way! (Sort of the idea with Linux, I guess)

Is there any terminal program that will let me make a connection over TCP/IP? At work, we use Procomm Plus/PCLink! to connect to the Unisys A-series mainframe, but we connect via TCP/IP.