This is just a quick rundown on how to put a console login shell on the serial port in GNU/Hurd. This document is Copyright 2001 Ryan M. Golbeck and is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. First of all, make sure that GNU Mach properly detects your serial ports by watching the bootup messages and looking for lines that contain "com0." If it is properly detected, you are set to go, if not setting that part up is beyond the scope of this document. Take note of the name of the port (ie. com0 or com1, etc). Another way to check GNU Mach's messages is to make a /dev/klog device (with the script /dev/MAKEDEV) and do the following: cat /dev/klog > ~/log C-c You have to interrupt it afterwards or the command will never return. The reason we are piping it to a file is that once you get the contents of klog, they are gone until next system reboot, so it is best to keep them around just in case. Next step is to setup the translator for your serial port. To do this set a translator on your com port via: settrans -cp /dev/com0 /hurd/term /dev/com0 device com0 replacing com0 with the com port you are using. Secondly, uncomment the line that looks similiar to this, or just add it manually in the file /etc/ttys com0 "/libexec/getty 9600" vt100 on secure This instructs init to put a login shell on com0. Now, just send your runttys a SIGHUP signal and a login shell should be available now on your serial port. The easiest way to connect to it from GNU/Linux is with minicom (make sure to use minicom -o when you run it, otherwise it tries to initialize the port as if it were a modem). If you get garbage or nothing on the screen, check that your connection speed is set properly in minicom (9600). I haven't yet figured out how to get a higher speed than 9600 (which is almost unbearably slow) or how to get a nice terminal type setup so that the screen doesn't get messed up too much during operation. If anyone has any luck with this please email me at rmgolbeck@uwaterloo.ca and I will add it here.