[Gllug] Hardware giveaway!

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 03:52:22PM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
[...]
> Most x86 server rack mount units have proper serial consoles, even for the
> bios. It is a shame that normal PCs don't do the same. I should have been
> easy enough.

It's questionable whether it's "proper". What I've seen is something that
basically tries to do a character-mode faithful emulation of poking around
the BIOS menus, complete with VGA colours and character set. In practice, it
speaks some weird VT100 variant that one's terminal emulator can't handle
properly, so the display renders incorrectly and it's a pain to use. I also
needed to plug in a keyboard and monitor to configure the BIOS to use a
serial console, which rather misses the point.

A *proper* serial console acknowledges that it's the mechanism of last
resort to get at the system, and makes it as simple as possible. Suns and
PPC Macs have a very simple command-line interface to configure them, so any
old terminal will suffice. (Of course, this assumes that your Mac is old
enough to actually have a serial port.)

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