However, this method still has some drawbacks.
Run screen, pointed at the serial port like so: screen /dev/cu.usbserial 57600Īnd then from within screen, hit ctrl + a, : and then type: exec ::: /usr/libexec/getty std.57600Įt voila, a clean and usable login shell appears on the terminal! I found a way to get a usable terminal session.
Something about Mac OS's configuration with getty is causing issues with this terminal. The exact same adapter/terminal/etc setup was connected to an Ubuntu Linux machine, with getty configured as described, and it Just Worked®, with no noise or garbage on the screen.įurthermore, using the third party application Serial to just write plain text to the terminal works without issue - no garbage, and newlines are handled correctly. WY-50 (the actual model of the terminal: lots of high-ascii symbols sprayed all over the screen).UNIX CONSOLE (lots of high-ascii symbols).With a prompt for Terminal type?.Ĭhanging the "personality" setting on the terminal, correlated with a reset above, to other promising options only modifies the "kind" of garbage I see - none of it is clean. Typing reset and hitting return gives me a clean error "Unknown terminal type: su (-1)". However, the garbage returns the next time I press return on the terminal.Īnother suggestion I read was to try using the reset command to clear the display to known-good settings. If I press Ctrl+ l on the terminal, the last line resets itself, and I see a clean prompt (not pictured). It's almost as if linefeed characters are being mangled somehow.
Rather than dropping down a line and prompting for a password, You see the UTHx appear, and then the Password prompt on the same line.Įntering my password (which is properly not echoed) displays the "last login" message, and then a completely trashed shell afterwards. I enter my username and press Return on the terminal keyboard. You can see some noise once the port is initialized, and then a "clean" login display. With the settings as described above, here's an example of what I mean on the terminal output: After logging in, this garbage tends to get concatenated to the end of commands, making the session almost unreliable and unusable. The login prompt itself is clean, but hitting return always generates a small amount of garbage. However, this results in a lot of garbage characters on the terminal screen.
After that was done, I got two devices created in /dev/, those are cu.usbserial and tty.usbserial.
I had to install a driver for the converter to become available. The MODEM port is connected to my mac via a DB25-DB9 converter, and from there to the mac via a USB-DB9 adapter using a Prolific chipset. From the manual, normally the device you're connecting to uses the MODEM port, and another ancilliary device like a printer uses the AUX port. The terminal itself has two ports on the back, one marked MODEM and one marked AUX. I've got a Wyse WY-50 terminal here that, for various nolstagia and productivity reasons (really!), I'd like to connect to my Macbook and use as a login terminal.