RE: [iPAQ] 3800 stowaway howto?

On Wed, 8 May 2002, Christian, Andrew wrote:
> `cat /dev/stowaway` busy means that some other program is holding the
> serial port open. That program is usually 'getty'. Check your
> /etc/inittab script: it comes with the line
> T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L /dev/ttySA0 115200 vt100
> Literally "run the getty program on the serial port. If it dies,
> restart it."

Note that to be even more literally, it means "In runlevels 2 and 3, run
the getty...". Why is this significant? If you look at the inittab, you'll
see that runlevels 2-5 are multi-user runlevels. Hence, to disable getty,
it's sufficient to switch to runlevel 4 or 5. This happens with command
"telinit 4". In fact, it might make sense to setup the iPAQ to use serial
login on runlevel 2 and allow network login with StowAway etc. on runlevel
4, for example.

There's one catch; the init-scripts ran with the lines like
"l2:2:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 2" take more unix knowledge to set up properly,
but as long as you just want to be able to temporarily use a serial
device, just type "telinit 4" and you're done. If you want to make it
permanent, modify the line on inittab to:
T0:3:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttySA0 115200 vt100
And now you can type "telinit 3" to enable serial logins.

For extra fun, try out
S0:4:respawn:/bin/cat /dev/stowaway
(Note you have to make sure you have stowaway module...)

Okay, too much information, but it tends to be better to know what you're
doing, than to have it break next time the config-files change or
something.

 -Jukka Santala
Received on Wed May 08 12:39:10 2002