Fedora 13 serial console no login prompt problem

[Geert Van Pamel]

I have recently upgraded to Fedora 13.

The following worked perfectly for Fedora 12. But it does no longer work for Fedora 13.

I do not get a login prompt when connecting a terminal emulator via a serial cable.

----
You need to reboot after making the following modifications:

vi /etc/securetty
ttyS0


vi /etc/event.d/ttyS0
# ttyS0 - mgetty
#
# This service maintains a getty on ttyS0 from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on stopped rc1
start on stopped rc2
start on stopped rc3
start on stopped rc4
start on stopped rc5

stop on shutdown

respawn
#exec /sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 57600 vt100
exec /sbin/mgetty -r -s 57600 ttyS0 vt100

[Michael Leu · Accepted solution]

I got curious about event.d and found this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/in-fedora13-etc-event-d-now-etc-sysconfig-init-827150/

[Geert Van Pamel]

I implemented the advice of Michael -- thanks!

vi /etc/init/serial-console-ttyS0.conf

start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
stop on starting runlevel [016]

respawn
exec /sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 57600 vt100
#exec /sbin/mgetty -r -s 57600 /dev/ttyS0 vt100

(need to reboot)


But I still got errors and the serial port did not work:

tail -f /var/log/messages
... kernel: ttyS0: LSR safety check engaged!


The following articles suggested me to use the boot option acpi=off (I tried pnpacpi=off but this did not work):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=260481

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/redhat-fedora-linux-help/85411-dev-ttys0-nc6000-not-working.html


The boot option acpi=off workaround seems to work. But perhaps other hardware features will now be inaccessible?

Seems to be an old unresolved Fedora bug resulting in a hardware IRQ conflict with an (unexisting) IR port for the Compaq nc6000 laptop? (I found references since Fedora core 6).

Question: Why does the Fedora team change the serial console behaviour at each release? Until and including Fedora 11 /etc/inittab itself could launch the ttyS0 console. The problems started with Fedora 12, and Fedora 13 which both required a different setup (see above) because /etc/inittab since release 12 only contains the default run level.

FYI, the pre-Fedora 12 setup:

vi /etc/inittab
...
C0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 57600 vt100

telinit q