I use mine as a terminal in a room away from my main computer location, but it could also be useful as a cheap second monitor dedicated to command-line work, to display logs or man pages, or as a jukebox interface in parties to avoid exposing your computer to spilled beer or other liquids (just run the lynx text web browser and some form of web remote control for iTunes).

The old beige G3 is the only OSX supported computer that have the appropriate built-in serial ports.

If youre not the lucky owner of such a machine, you can use a USB - RS232 interface (I do have a beige G3, so I do not have tested this with USB, but it should work as well).

Obviously, use tty.modem if you connect your old terminal to the modem port.

Enter your login and password, and youre now able to run any command you like.

For my MCT U232-P9, its tty.USB Serial.

The etcttys entries go like this: tty.USA28X13P1.1 usrlibexecgetty local.9600 vt100 on local secure tty.USA28X13P2.2 usrlibexecgetty local.9600 vt100 on local secure It was great fun figuring this out.

Strange thing, though -- every once in a while getty goes berserk chewing up memory until it punches out and restarts.

Weird. The process servicing the VT320 seems especially prone to this.

From init man page (init is the mother of all processes, which in particular read the tty file to start getty on turned on lines).

I havent tried it yet but I was thinking of stuffing that on a weasel so I can admin my NetBSD server from my powerbook even when it is in single user mode.

I verified the serial line works by cping to and from the terminal.

Vt100 Terminal Emulator Full VT100 Functionality

I really need this because I work on several OpenVMS systems that require full VT100 functionality (actually a VT525 with a LK411 keyboard) through ssh.

As Im not entirely up to speed on UNIX so the man pages havent provided any help for me.

I realize its been a couple of years since your comment, but.

I suspect, but have yet to confirm, that the serial terminal support described in this hint can be re-enabled in Leopard and beyond by adding back the required entries in the etcgettytab and etcttys files.

Vt100 Terminal Emulator Mac Intelligent Serial

You may want to reference footnote s 8 and 10 in the article I wrote for A2Central.com on Apple II to Mac Intelligent Serial Terminal File Transfers.

The article is here link: OS X Serial Terminal and includes more information than you probably care to learn, but it details the specific entry in the gettytab file to get everything working, as well as adding a few bonuses not covered in the original hint, including transparent zmodem transfers and 57,600 baud operation.

Ive since moved up to 115,200 baud, and thats with an Apple II as the terminal.

When I had access to a friends Leopard Mac to examine the ttys and gettytab files with a text editor, I found the gettytab file table had been gutted and it seemed like the ttys file was a little skinnier too.

My friend had no interest in serial terminal support so I didnt get to experiment -- cant say I blame him.

It would be nice if someone could see if my suspicion was correct.

This file is then placed in the LibraryLaunchDaemons directory.

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