[rescue] Serial ports [was Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]]

[Andrew Gaylard]

> > Serial ports are a different story, but if you are using *NIX as the
> > operating system for the terminal emulator, or a Windows terminal program
> > instead of Procomm* in a dos box, it should work fine with one of those
> > PCI serial port cards.
> > Geoff.
>

The lack of serial ports on modern laptops drives me nuts.

My current one, a HP8710p with gigs of RAM and let-me-count-the-CPUs
has one... but it's only available on the docking station.  And Linux sees
/dev/ttyS0, but the pins aren't wired to an external connector.  So there I
sit at the racks, with a laptop, docking station, power supply (without
which
the DS won't work properly), just to get a serial console to some piece of
equipment.

USB serial ports sometimes work, sometimes don't.  Maybe it's me.

$WORK[$n-1] actually kept an ancient Dell C600 laptop from the last
millennium around, simply to be a portable serial console.  It had about
1G of disk, which wasn't a problem as we set it up to log directly into
"cu -s 9600 -l ttyS0".  It was brilliant.


Andrew