Topic: How to watch a serial port from the console ?

[Fred Knopff]

We are going to setup e-smith in our residential apartment building.  At present we have a craptop that is acting as a terminal that displays the output from an entracomp access card.  The card reader prints to to a serial port.  Being new to linux I would like to know how to watch that output from e-smith so that we can throw the craptop away.

TIA

[Hazen Valliant-Saunders]

Try the following

cat /dev/ttyS0

or depending on what your serial port is.

do the following

1. Verify that your serial port is supported via the /dev directroy
To give you an idea, you can watch the binary information fed to your sound card by typeing ;
cat /dev/dsp  (then a whole lot o garbage)

2. With your serial port configured you'll have to figure out which one you wish to use.  Linux supports up to or around 256 of them.
so we hope it's attached to Com1 or some other knowen propritary port of the like.
com1 is on "/dev/ttyS0"  the "cat" command tells your system to just simply "display" whatever information is there, like "#cat /proc/modules" will show you which modules you have loaded into your kernel  (FYI try typeing "man cat" at a prompt to get the administrative manual or "info cat")  

Now the serialport connected to your specific card depends on a. the driver and
b. is it internal or external?  

Well that bieng said here are some links that contain a wealth of information
www.linuxdoc.org
www.freshmeat.net
www.devshed.com
www.ilibio.org

N-Joy

[Fred Knopf]

Thats helpfull but I don't think %cat is going to update everytime some one uses a card key or allow us to add and delete cards the reader comes with dos software but it isn't needed as we used it with a Mac for years just pointing the terminal emulator to the serial port

[Boris]

Then something like minicom is a way to go