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Re: Oldworld Serial Console



On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 01:57:51PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote:
} On Friday, September 24, 2004, at 09:17 AM, Gregory Seidman wrote:
} >In fact, I can attest to using an ordinary Mac printer cable between my
} >Oldworld Mac running Linux and my dual G4 with a Keyspan adapter and
} >running MacOS X. I use minicom on the Mac and have set up quik, not
} >BootX, to allow me to have a console over the serial line.
} 
} Thanks for the explanation!
} 
} Could I prevail upon you to post a detailed step-by-step 
} description of how you got quik to let you have a console over the 
} serial line?
} 
} There are at least a few of us who have been beating our heads 
} against this particular wall for some time...

It was actually pretty easy. Here's the relevant chunk of my quik.conf:

image=/boot/failsafe
        label=singlesafe
        read-only
        append="console=ttyS0,38400n8 -b"

So I keep a copy of (actually a hard link to) some kernel (in this case,
Debian's 2.4.20) as /boot/failsafe. Note that it is a hard link rather than
a soft link, since I am told that quik can't follow symlinks. The append
line sets console to ttyS0 with appropriate flags and boots in single user
mode.

The machine I have is a PowerCenter Pro 180, and its OF implementation is
buggy; it defaults to using ttya (i.e. the modem port a.k.a. ttyS0) for I/O
at boot anyway, so it's the only way I can interact with the quik prompt.
There are ways to change this, but the best information I have (including
actual experimentation) is that there is no way to get it to use the
attached monitor for output (though I think I got it to use the ADB
keyboard for input). For other machines you may have to fight with OF a bit
to get it to use ttya for its OF boot I/O; information about such things
can be found at http://penguinppc.org/projects/quik/quirks.shtml

} Thanks!
} Rick
--Greg



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