Booting the First Debian Disk and Running a Serial Console
I am attempting to boot a Debian installation CDROM such that
I can get a serial console. I have actually gotten this to work a few
times but I seem to have lost the touch so to speak.
It is my understanding that one can boot the system with the
Debian installation CDROM in place and type the following at the boot: prompt.
linux console=/dev/ttyS0,9600,n,8,1
I not only don't get the serial console, but I end up at a
language selection screen. If I simply hit Enter at the boot: prompt,
I also end up in the language selection screen. I seem to recall that
when things work, the serial port comes to life and I first see a
message on the serial terminal in English introducing one to Linux.
You have to hit Space to move down to the next screen which is the set
of options available.
As a computer user who is blind, I thought I might be
accidentally typing the command wrong since there is originally
nothing to echo the linux command, but I had someone watch and confirm
that
linux console=/dev/ttyS0 is what I typed.
Of course, if the serial port in question is Com2, that would
be /dev/ttyS1. Believe me, I almost have carpal-tunnel syndrome
trying this command over and over.
On rare occasions, it has mysteriously worked.
The system's serial ports are working fine and a FreeBSD boot
disk did start the serial console on the first try. Unfortunately,
the FreeBSD disk's repair mode won't help me much on the linux system
or I would have happily used it.
Has anybody got any ideas as to what causes it to both not go
serial and go in to that language selection screen?
I have tried both a 2-year-old Debian installation disk and a
Debian3.0 distribution I downloaded this very day. It also misbehaves
in the same way.
The computer already has Debian on it and has worked
flawlessly until I damaged some shared libraries on Saturday and
needed to run the repair shell and replace them with good copies in
/lib. That's when I discovered I couldn't reliably boot a serial
console from the installation disk.
You don't want to know how I damaged the /lib files, but
suffice it to say, I had a shell script give me a nasty surprise.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
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