But what's the operative principle here? Apparently the VT100 was sending an inappropriate response, but I don't see how the terminal version can in and of itself make a difference - waiting for input is waiting for input. Could it be something in end-of-line or echo or something?
Who knows? You'd probably have to get into the details of the emulation protocol to figure it out. But I can reproduce the problem so it's not a coincidence. I mean, it's not a false cause. Put hyperterminal in vt100 emulation and it acts like you're holding the enter key donw. Put it in ANSI emulation and it works. I switched it back and forth several times to make sure.
Could be that there's something bogus in Hyperterminal's vt100 emulation though. It seems unlikely though since it is fairly widely used.
Something I'm a bit less sure of is that you have to use 9600 bps. I had done several serial installs of Red Hat at different speeds. RH will configure a serial console for you at whatever speed you do the install. So if you configure a 115200 bps serial console to use for the installation, when you reboot after the install, you'll get boot messages on your serial console at the same bps.
Obviously, that's very nice. But debian doesn't seem to do it. I had configured my serial console for the install at 115200 and after the reboot, I got nothing. But I messed around for a while and discovered that it was talking to the serial port but at 9600 bps. But then I still had the problem with the prompts scrolling by.
I know that the problem with the prompts scrolling by was not related to the bps mix up because I did a complete reinstall at 9600 bps and still had the problem. I mean, I even re-initialized the linux partitions so any config files from the first install should have been blown away.
So I'm pretty sure you have to install at 9600 bps but I didn't try re-installing with ANSI emulation and 115200 bps. I can't swear that that doesn't work.
I've re-installed so many times over the past 2 weeks that I have many of the key sequences memorized and I don't even have to listen for the prompt. I had to reinstall again yesterday because I hadn't bothered to create a login other than root and the root password didn't seem to work. Plus, I had a serial console working but not a *regular* one. I couldn't reboot in single user mode in order to change the root password. I can't explain that either. I'm sure if I retrace my steps I could figure out what I did wrong. But my point is that the debian install isn't nearly as forgiving as RH.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not promoting Red Hat. I won't use RH because they're demanding money from me. Asking for it is one thing. Demanding it is something else. Debian never will so I don't care what it takes, I'm switching to debian.
But it has been a struggle. I could go on and on. I have 2 ethernet cards in the machine and the If you cat /proc/pci, you'll usually be able to identify your cards and then you can tell which drivers you need to use. Well, the 2nd ethernet card is showing up as an unidentified 3com card. I've never seen anything like that and I don't really know how to deal with it. I'm sure I can figure out what to do but it's typical of the baby steps I've had to take to do this install. If I wasn't such a nerd, if this wasn't fun for me, I think I'd have given up by now and tried another distro.
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