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.

getty running under launchd with the above plist.

So, I can get basic communication if the computer is connected to the terminal by way of the AUX port.

Moving the serial line on the terminal to the AUX port and reconfiguring it to use the AUX port for communication: SOMETHING HAPPENS!.

Using the tty.usbserial device rather than the cu.usbserial device in combination with the above: No output.

Different baud rates set on the getty command and the terminal (from 9600 to 19200): No output.

Flow control on the terminal set to NONE: No output.

(Again, validates the guide)įrom here, I tried the plist method by adding a file to /Library/LaunchDaemons named ist with the following content: Īfter loading and running the job, the following things were tried, each time attempting to stop, edit, unload, reload, and run the job in order:

Adding a line to /etc/ttys: No output.

In all cases, calls to getty whether in a file or by hand were of the form /usr/libexec/getty std.19200 cu.usbserialĪnytime you see 'No output', this means the terminal was slient, showing nothing, and was unresponsive to keypresses.

This setup has proven difficult to troubleshoot, since incorrect communication with the serial device tends to 'hang' it, requiring a reboot to become usable again. The terminal itself is set to VT100 emulation mode at 19200 baud, with DTR flow control on receive and no flow control on send (the only option for send flow control is XON/XOFF) Difficulty I followed the guide here to set up a LaunchDaemon Plist to spawn a getty session attached to the terminal, since apparently you can't just either edit /etc/ttys or run getty by hand in modern OSXes. 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.

Mac os x serial terminal emulator