[SWLUG] Serial terminal echoing(and things)

[Steve Anderson]

Hello all

Moving away from the flame war about IRC (FWIW, I hate all chat devices 
equally) and toward the use and celebration of all things Linux, here's 
a thing I'd like a hand with.

I've now got a fully functioning Linux device. It's going to be the most 
powerful alarm clock on the planet, ever. (Give or take.) It's utterly 
silent, running on a fanless Mini-ITX mobo with a fanless PSU, booting 
Ubuntu (in server mode) off a Compact Flash card and, thanks to 
ndiswrapper, it's hooked up to my LAN wirelessly.

The vast majority of the time, it's not going to have a monitor 
connected. The clock display itself is going to be a backlit Nokia 3310 
screen hooked up to the parallel port, and I've got a 24x8 alphanumeric 
LCD hooked up to the serial port which can be treated as a VT100 
display. Most of the time this second display will be displaying RSS 
gubbins, email details, that sort of thing. However, occasionally I 
might like to use it as a terminal display. I'd like to be able to plug 
a keyboard into the device and see a command prompt on the LCD. Anybody 
tried anything like this before? Is there a simple way to flick this 
sort of thing on and off, so that a seperate process (the one actually 
running the clock) could invoke this as and when needed by me?

All input, as always, is gratefully etc.

Steve