Can't connect to a dumb terminal with minicom

For educational purposes, I am trying to connect a linux machine with a Knoppix install to a dummy terminal. I am unable to connect with minicom, even as root, so it doesn't seem to be a permission issue. I tried isntalling gtkTerm which gives me "Control signals read: input/output error" messages.

I've also tried 'screen /dev/ttyS1 9600', which I believe is supposed to pipe the data from the terminal directly to the console. 'screen' tells me that '/dev/ttyS1 is not a tty'. I noticed that /dev/ttyS1 shows up as a dialout, not a tty:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root dialout 4, 65 May 9 04:16 /dev/ttyS1

What does that mean?

Thanks for any help.

eh? somewhat confused just now. biyif i get this rightyou are trying it the wrong way, the terminal must conect to the computer. atleast if it is a dumb terminal. you can ofcource use minicom to conect to a switch or another computer though.

if it is the first case senario and you have a hd install. just edit the /etc/inittab file to include a line something like the bold one below.

Quote:

---

# Local serial lines:
s0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 19200 vt100

---

this is ofcource if you have a installed linux.
if not a hd install you likely have to come back and ask some more.

OErjan, thanks for the suggestion. It turns out the problem was that the serial ports were on a PCI card, and the Knoppix install doesn't have a driver for them. The single serial port on the motherboard works, but the extra PCI ports don't.
"lspci -v" showed the PCI serial card was recognized, but no drivers were loaded. According to the PCI card manufacturer, the device should be supported as Plug n Play in version 2.6.X of the kernel. Does knoppix not include that type of driver

yes it should work what version of knoppix is it? 3.8.2 and up is 2.6 kernel iirc

I believe it was knoppix 3.8, checking the kernel with "uname -r" returns 2.6.11