Re: controlling installation from a serial terminal

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com>]

Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es> writes:
>On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 10:08:57PM -0500, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
>> I am trying to set up boot files that will allow an installation to be
>> controlled from a serial terminal.  This would let a blind user
>> install Debian, using a second computer with a terminal emulator and a
>> speech synthesizer.  (I once wrote up such a procedure for installing
>> Slackware.)
>
>There's already support for serial consoles on Sparc and VME/m68k. It's
>trivial to use that on other architectures where the kernel supports
>them. It's just a matter of #define SERIAL_CONSOLE on dinstall.h for i386
>and booting with the proper kernel parameter (console=/dev/ttyS*).

According to my reading, "#define SERIAL_CONSOLE" affects only the
base system (after the second boot).  

>I would try using a 2.1.x kernel. There may be other problems, as the
>floppies have been tested with 2.0.x kernels only, but it may work.

Okay, I'll try it.  I assume it needs to be configured with 
    CONFIG_SERIAL=y
    CONFIG_SERIAL_CONSOLE=y

Is that enough to allow dinstall (that is, after the first boot) to be
controlled via a serial terminal?  I expect some change is also needed
in utilities/busybox/init.c, but so far I have not figured out what.

				 - Jim Van Zandt