Can't connect to a dumb terminal with minicom

[rtrost]

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.

[OErjan]

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.

# 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.

[rtrost]

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

[OErjan]

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

[rtrost]

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