[TriLUG] Stupid question time - Serial terminal and Linux

[Mike M]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 10:22:53AM -0500, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Mike M wrote:
> 
> > Was it a sparc or something that has a reasonable serial interface? If
> > so then life will be much easier.  It's the x86 archs that are
> > non-trivial for serial consoles.
> 
> The terminal, in my case, is a PC.  The other end is usually, in my case, 
> a sparc.  You have pretty full access to everything with a serial console 
> on a sparc (or most other non-PC platforms for that matter).  On a PC, 
> unless you have special hardware, you can't get into it from the serial 
> port until the OS is up and even then it has to be specially configured to 
> give you a serial console.  The non-x86 hardware gives you serial console 
> at a much lower level, such that you can send a BREAK to the OS and have a 
> boot PROM prompt.

I thought that with super-human powers you can load Linux on a x86 over
COMx.  Googling around doesn't support this possibility though.  i

Maybe if you had Busybox or a microdistro Linux running in a partition. 
This basic system can be modified to support serial console.  Then you 
could use it to install a bigdistro Linux into another partition set, and mod LILO
to default boot bigdistro the  partition.  I saw that LILO and GRUB will
communicate over a serial port. It's like having a rescue disk partition always 
on the HDD.
-- 
Mike

Two hundred years ago, we note mischievously, the average American or 
European had a standard of living not very much superior to that of the
average man in India or China. -- dailyreckoning.com