HP 700/96 Terminal question

[Christopher R. Martin]

I have an HP 700/96 terminal, and I would like to connect it to a regular x86 machine on serial port 1. I have connected it via null modem cable, and tried to get it to work, with no real success. I am running linux, and used agetty to set the serial port up to work with the terminal and to the best of my knowledge set the terminal up correctly also. I am wondering if it is an incompatiblilty of the terminal modes. I have tried HP, EM100, and EM220 with vt100, vt220 and vt102 emulations under agetty. If someone could provide a link to the actual pdf of the manual, or maybe suggest something I would really appreciate it. Thank you all for your time.

[DCE]

Did you configure the terminal itself? You configure it via the F keys. You can set the baud rate, terminal type, port type and number, etc.

Also you ca reset the terminal to default settings by holding down the "D" key while powering it up

HTH
Dave

[Torsten.]

Important is the speed - 9600 is the default.

Due to the age of the terminal, there are no pdf manuals I guess.

[Christopher R. Martin]

Yes sorry I may have not stated clearly that I had set the modes on the actual terminal itself to HP, tried vt100, vt220, and vt102 on the linux machine, then switched terminal to em100 and tested all the above modes on the linux machine's serial port. and etc. I also reset the terminal to defaults with the F-key menu , and by holding down D during boot up. I tried changing the serial ports on the back via F-keys also. I saw somewhere in the forums that the terminal mode can be switched to VT100 but I saw nothing that said how, and under the F-key menu I only had the choices of HP, EM100 EM52 and EM220. I left the serial port and the terminal at 9600 baud to make sure it would work before I jumped the speed up and messed with too much at the same time. I am wondering now if it is misconfiguration or just that the HP 700/96 terminal is incompatible with non hp hardware.

[Torsten.]

I guess you tried an instruction like http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Serial/serial-console.html (just an example, the first I found).

I never did this with a linux system.
But I cannot imagine an incompatiblilty of the terminal. Even the emulation (EM100 = vt100) is not correct, you should see at least some "garbage".

The most suspect part may be the cable - is this the original one?
You may also check the servers serial port - who knows ...

[DCE]

I agree wtih Torsten - it could be the cable.

Try a regular serial cable - HP does some funky things with their serial ports - the pin out could very well be different for you system.

[Christopher R. Martin]

I will try messing more with the cables. You both might be right, maybe it is some weird cable layout or something. I wish I could figure out how to configure this thing to get it working. I really don't want to have to buy a different serial terminal.

[Michael Steele_2]

Here's the pin layouts:

DB25M DB9F
1 GND ------------------- Shell GND
2 ------------------- 2
3 ------------------- 3
4 ------------------- 1
5,6 ------------------- 4
7 ------------------- 5
8 ------------------- 7
20 ------------------- 8,6

Tried a null modem or crossover cable?

[Bill Hassell]

The emulation mode is unimportant to get this working. It's an ASCII terminal so just getting a login prompt will not need special video codes. ASSUMING that the Linux side is working correctly, the only two pieces of data are the transmit/receive wires and whether Linux needs 4,5,6,8 and 20 (assuming a 25 pin connector) strapped together. These signals tell the Linux driver that all the required modem signals are present. There should be some flags in the device file to ignore the handshake signals and just require pins 2,3,7.

There's only 2 possible ways to connect -- 2-3 3-2 and 7-7, or 2-2 3-3 and 7-7. You may need to get an inexpensive RS-232 signal monitor (LEDs) to see if anything lights up when you enable the port. And try cat'ing a long file out to the device file to see if you can see anything on the screen. If you do, then the agetty setup isn't working.

[Christopher R. Martin]

Thank you all for your help. Later last night I played with all the cables, and decided to switch my null modem cable out with a null modem adapter and a different serial extension cable and the terminal worked. The Previous Null modem cable must have been bad. I should have checked that before I tried the rest of that stuff. Well thank you all again.