[rescue] Serial ports [was Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]]

[Eric Railine]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Andrew Gaylard <ag at computer.org> wrote:
>
> The lack of serial ports on modern laptops drives me nuts.
<snip>
> USB serial ports sometimes work, sometimes don't.  Maybe it's me.

It's not just you.  I've had intermittent issues with USB serial
adapters.  My current one will usually work fine as long as I've just
booted up without going into standby - once I go into standby (whether
I've connected it the first time before or after the standby seems
irrelevant) it becomes a crap shoot.  Sometimes it connects and sees
console output from the host but won't transmit input, sometimes
neither works until I reboot, sometimes it'll just start working at
some random point.

Fun, fun.

> $WORK[$n-1] actually kept an ancient Dell C600 laptop from the last
> millennium around, simply to be a portable serial console.  It had about
> 1G of disk, which wasn't a problem as we set it up to log directly into
> "cu -s 9600 -l ttyS0".  It was brilliant.

We've done similar as well.

-Eric