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Accessing Porteus via serial ("console=" doesn't work)

Posted: 27 Feb 2015, 14:25
by rgroner
I'm trying to be able to log in and access the Porteus system via serial port. On my openSUSE system, I just add "console=ttyS0,9600n8" to the kernel args on boot and it comes up. I can then log in via the serial port and do whatever I want on the systme. When I try that with Porteus 3.1, it gets to "Loading initrd.xz....ready" and hangs. Once it also rebooted after waiting there for a while.

I didn't see an obvious cheatcode for this....though I've managed to miss them before. :roll:

Re: Accessing Porteus via serial ("console=" doesn't work)

Posted: 27 Feb 2015, 15:16
by rgroner
Ok, I've found the inittab entry and uncommented it. Upon reboot, I can attempt to log in via serial, but it doesn't appear to be recognizing the root password I have set. I can log in via guest/guest so far and that's it. I can then su to root, so I guess that's workable.

Re: Accessing Porteus via serial ("console=" doesn't work)

Posted: 27 Feb 2015, 15:46
by francois
Interesting use that you present there. I tried to figure out what you used that setup for:
http://www.stlinux.com/install/getting-started/serial
http://www.cyberciti.biz/hardware/5-lin ... l-console/

The simplest way to monitor a system is to use a terminal emulator connected to the serial port (available on most target development boards). Terminals can produce diagnostic messages in almost all circumstances as they can be driven at a very low level. This is useful when troubleshooting Linux kernel boot problems... ...

To use a serial port in this way, you will need:

a target board with a serial port
a suitable serial cable
a terminal (or terminal emulator)
Serial port terminology originates from connections between dumb terminals and mainframe computers. The terminal devices, which include terminals, printers and other peripherals at one end and the computer itself at the other end, are known as data terminal equipment (DTE). The intermediate devices, such as modems, are known as data communications equipment (DCE).


Simply stated, for what purposes do you use that porteus via serial setup for?

Re: Accessing Porteus via serial ("console=" doesn't work)

Posted: 27 Feb 2015, 16:15
by rgroner
We have two headless computer systems that communicate with each other via ethernet. There's no other I/O of the system that we can access except serial. So, we need to be able to log into each system via serial port, and then test that the ethernet connection between them works. I'm going to make the Porteus disks on a different system and then plug it into the test systems.

Porteus is proving to be absolutely wonderful for coming up with a quick means of testing systems like this. We're slowly moving our testing apparatus over from DOS to Porteus overall.