On 09/05/11 11:54, RiverWind wrote:
I do not believe that using my modem in order to dial up my
Linux machine would work, but I also know that there is such a
thing as a "NUL" modem cable???
It depends on what you want to do. If you want your DOS machine
to simply be a dumb terminal (using your "Commo" program), and
not running any real/internet applications on your DOS machine,
then you can set it up pretty easily. If you want to run
internet-aware programs on your DOS box it depends on how you
connect to the internet: if you have dial-up, then you can have
either machine do the dialing and just refrain from using them at
the same time; whereas if you have an always-on connection (DSL,
cable, FIOS, etc), you can either share that connection with a
dedicated router (and have both your Linux box and your DOS box
plugged into that router) or have your Linux box act as a router
to share your connection with your DOS box (though this would
either require a second network-card in your Linux box, or some
chicanery to share the internet connection over a serial line
(i.e. a null-modem serial cable).
If you're just using your DOS machine as a terminal with "Commo",
you can edit your /etc/inittab to uncomment a line with "getty"
to listen on a corresponding port. If your Linux box has a real
serial port, it would be a line something like
/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
which roughly means "spawn a virtual terminal, listening on
/dev/ttyS0 (COM1 if you booted the machine in DOS) at 9600 baud,
and act like a standard VT-100 terminal" I believe that it
defaults to the comm settings of "N81". You would then just
connect a null-modem cable between the machines' serial ports and
point your DOS machine's terminal software at its comm port at
9600,n,8,1 and you should find your login prompt ready to go.
If your Linux box doesn't have a real serial port, you can get a
USB-to-Serial dongle that gives you a serial port...usually at
/dev/ttyUSB0 or something of the sort. You'd just tweak the
above inittab line to have that terminal ("ttyUSB0") instead of
"ttyS0".
Because the /etc/inittab file is a protected file, you'd have to
edit as root either with
bash$ sudo $EDITOR /etc/inittab
or
bash$ su
(type in the admin/root password)
bash# $EDITOR /etc/inittab
where "$EDITOR" is your editor of choice (vi, ed, vim, pico,
nano, emacs, joe, etc).
Once you've uncommented/edited the line to have the settings you
want, you can issue (again, as root either via "su" or "sudo")
telinit Q
to tell the main process to re-read the /etc/inittab
You can read up on that at "man telinit".
I would appreciate any and all advice I can get regarding
this matter, so that I won't need to pay for an ISP when I
already have one.
Unless you're using some proprietary ISP that doesn't play well
with Linux (AOL used to be bad about this), you shouldn't have to
pay twice for a connection. Either it's dial-up and you just let
one computer use it at a time or you use one machine to connect
and share the connection with the other; or you have a dedicated
DSL/cable/FIOS line and you have a router sharing the connection
(whether that router is a dedicated box like a Linksys/DLink, or
your Linux box acting as a router).
I hope this gives you some decent info to get you pointed in the
right direction.
-Tim
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