On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 09:14:21AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
As an alternative to minicom, 'screen' also makes a useful serial  
terminal
program.  At least on OS X, I often do something like this to talk to
routers and the like:
screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600
"Ctrl-A Shift-K" will exit.  "Ctrl-A i" will give you a nice  
little display
of what the serial control lines are doing.
I haven't tried it under Linux, but it should work the same.  Of  
course
you'd substitute /dev/ttyS0 or whatever device you're using for
/dev/tty.usbserial.
I tried it on a sid box, but just end up with screen showing a  
shell on
the local host, i.e., the same as without those arguments.