What application (and options) should I use to get terminal access to my Raspberry Pi over a USB/serial cable on Linux?

Question

I've got a Raspberry Pi with a Raspbian SD card, connected to my Debian laptop via a USB TTY cable. The cable is supplying power to the board; my user is in the dialout group, and can see /dev/ttyUSB0. What application should I use to obtain terminal access to my Raspberry Pi via this serial port?

Answer 1

I use the Occidentalis distribution, and it has the following lines at the end of /etc/inittab:

#Spawn a getty on Raspberry Pi serial line
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100

Once you have this you should be able to use a terminal emulator like Minicom on your Debian laptop to connect to the Raspberry Pi, and you will get a login prompt. Make sure the port speed on the laptop matches the settings on the Raspberry Pi (115200 bits/s in the example above).

Answer 2

You can use any terminal emulator such as PuTTY. You can even do a simple test with cat /dev/ttyUSB0 and try typing stuff in there...

However, there must be something running at the other end, such as getty for you to be able to login. I believe this might be activated by default on ttyAMA0.

Answer 3

Edit /etc/inittab to spawn serial consoles.

I like to use the Minicom client on the other end, rather than PuTTY.