On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Martin McCormick wrote: > FreeBSD installations do have a very useful feature in > which one types boot -h on the local keyboard just after the boot > begins and the system goes serial at that time. > > Do any of the newest installation CDROM's for Debian > Linux have anything like this? This is not Debian specific. It's a kernel feature. At the boot prompt you add: console=<device> to your normal boot line; <device> should be the device you are using (such as ttyS0 or ttyS1). The kernel documentation has a file called serial-console.txt which gives more detail, including that fact that if you have no video card, the console will default to the first available serial port. This has come up many times on this list, so you can get more from the list archives: perhaps something about this should be in the blinux FAQ? LCR -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html