phaq

On a Sun Ultra 5 keyboard and screen are used as default input/output devices. This causes the serial port not to be used by default, at least not unless you send a keypress over an attached terminal.

To change this behaviour, two values need to be changed in OpenBoot.

So first we need to enter OpenBoot by sending a Break over the serial line or STOP-A.

Examine the environment values like this and look out for the variables called ‘input-device’ and ‘output-device’:

# printenv
Variable Name Value Default Value
[output omitted]
output-device screen screen
input-device keyboard keyboard
[output omitted]

Set them as follows to enable the serial console to be used by default:

#setenv output-device virtual-console
#setenv input-device virtual-console

Next time the machine is powered on, the serial console should come up at once.

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