Serial Devices
 

I have two questions regarding serial devices. This is on a Slackware 9.0 system.

1. I have a WYSE WY-55 serial terminal connected to my system. I am currently using VT100 emulation for this terminal, but certain things just do not seem to be interpreted correctly. For instance, I get a lot of "\n"'s at the end of lines, which looks like a newline command that is not being interpreted correctly by the terminal. I was wondering what other terminal emulation "modes" that I should try with this WY-55 terminal. I do not even know what other modes are available other than like VT320.

2. The computer that I am using seems to have a card in it to provide an additional serial and parallel port for the computer. I tried plugging the WY-55 terminal into this serial connnection, but could not get anything to work. Does anyone have some information on how I can check to see if Slack is even recognizing my additional serial port, I suspect that it is not. Any information on how to get this second serial port will be greatly appreciated!!

1. Try setting your TERM environment variable to "wy55". If that doesn't work, try "wy50". I know the WYSE WY-50 is supported, and that should be close enoough to the WY-55 model to work. At least, it will work better than the VT100.

There are two databases of terminal support information in Linux: termcap and terminfo. Termcap data is in /etc/termcap, and terminfo data is in directories under /usr/share/terminfo. If you look in these, you'll see that there's a huge number of supported terminal types. If you find that the wy50 setting does most things right, but a few things are still broken, and you have docs on that terminal that tell how to program those features, you can create a termcap or terminfo description for the wy55 that does things just right. Like you really want to get into that! :-)

2. It's possible that the system didn't see that serial line. Figure out which device it is (one of /dev/ttyS?) and echo something to it to see if it shows up on the WY-55. If not, try another ttyS? number until you get the right one. Then you have to arrange for a getty program to be running on that device so that the system will present a login: prompt on the terminal. This is usually done in /etc/inittab. You'll see some mgetty lines in there for the virtual terminals running on your system's console. You can add similar lines for the serial device your terminal is on.

Hope this helps!