poniedziałek, 13 lutego 2012

Linux Box, some serial buisness.

Yesterday I managed to get sme spare time to get a new computer up and running. This one is planned to be a Linux Box with various uses (for now it has one). The computer itself looks rather harmfull and compact: 


Inside there is a industrial motherboard in PICMG 1.3 standard with an backplane for 6 PCI-X cards. On the card - double Xeon 2,8 GHz and 1GB of ECC DDRAM. Sounds like enough for most of the things that I could be capable of imagining to do on such machine. Also I crammed an SCSI controller that will be mostly used to interface to 50pin disks that I use for the Amiga (as far as I know Linux is capable of mounting FFS and/or OFS file systems). As for software I went with Ubuntu Linux - probably out of laziness (as I had it on some Live CD). I've downloaded the newest distribution of the Ubuntu Server and just installed it on this machine. As the ethernet connection is not running on this machine (dunno' why, have to check it) I haven't installed anything more.


So, let's try to interface with the Amiga. I have connected both computers with a Nullmodem (a standard one, not some of the fancy 'ADF-transfer kits', that people are selling (price of a nullmodem x 10) and in fact these ARE normal nullmodems). So I chose some example file on my DH0, and typed in on the screen to see its content. After that I started the Linux Box and made it to start listening to the serial port (ttyS0):
cat /dev/ttyS0
This wat you will see it on the display, but yoy can redirect it to a file by using the >> {your file}. Then, on Amiga, I have sent the file over a serial:
type {your file} to ser:




As you can see - it works. It works accidentally as I have not done anything to set the serial port parameters, both computers are working in the default settings. I have to install setserial on the Linux Box to be able to configure the serial port, and in order to do that I have to have an internet connection on it up and running, so I guess it's the closest thing that I will be doing.

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