Can someone please help me use minicom to establish a serial connection via a "null modem" cable. No modems are involved here, so I am not quite sure how to "make it go". That is, there is no modem to "initialize".

Minicom is always "offline" according to the status bar at the bottom of the screen. How do I go "online", or otherwise begin listening to what is happening on the serial cable???

I know my serial cable is good, as I can re-direct the output of the computer with minicom to the other computer:
$ ls > /dev/ttyS0
and of course I see the output on the other terminal.

But once I start minicom, it is just waiting in offline mode, and never recieves anything from the other system.

Thanks,

- Joe

I have got similar problems with my minicom and i need some expert to reply ASAP -

Probably far too late to help the earlier posters here, but FYI to anyone else who comes this way :

I have minicom working successfully over various kinds of null-modem cable, using it as a linux console for several systems which have no attached monitor. And in all cases minicom continually shows the status as "Offline". In fact I have never seen it "Online". So "Offline" is not related to any problem of not being able to receive or input data over the line.

My guess is that the cause lies somewhere on the other end, i.e. on the machine which you want to access via the minicom. If it is a linux console, then ensure you have included that machine's serial port in the list of console devices in the "console" kernel command-line parameters, e.g. here is one of mine

console=ttyS0,115200n8r console=tty0