It’s 2025, and yes, you can still install and run a modern Linux distribution like Debian through a real hardware terminal.
While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I’ve never before used it as a serial console all the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader.
This might be fun, I thought.
↫ John Goerzen at The Changelog
It seems Debian does a lot of the correct configurations for you, but there’s still a few things you’ll need to manually change, but none of it seems particularly complicated. Once the installation is completed, you have a system that’s completely accessible and usable from a hardware terminal, which, while maybe not particularly important in this day and age of effortless terminal emulators, is still quite a cool thing to have.
A similar method to boot and install using a serial console for OpenBSD for those so inclined:
http://www.weirdnet.nl/openbsd/serial/
Morgan,
From your link…
I do have several bits of x86 equipment that natively supports the serial console (through the bios), but it is too bad that it’s not standard and most normal desktop systems lack this ability. Even so, I’ve found that it’s not hard for an OS and bootloader to support a serial console on x86. The boot media for my distro does this out of the box by default, no monitor or keyboard necessary. It’s disappointing that more linux distros don’t do this because it would mean you could access your system via serial console even if the BIOS didn’t support it.
Yea, we can change the OS to do it, but it’s rather unfortunate for headless systems that the default boot media requires keyboard/monitor.
The reason NOT to support a serial port is because it assumes the serial port doesn’t have another purpose. Although in practice I only use the system serial ports for console and nothing else. If this were the rational for not supporting a serial console, then perhaps a compromise would be for the OS to listen for a specific knock knock sequence to enable the serial console like pressing the escape key a few times (kind of like windows used to have the F8 key enable the bootloader menu). This way you could still activate the serial console without having to connect a monitor/keyboard.
Another idea would be to have a USB-serial adapter reprogrammed with a product ID to explicitly convey that the OS should use it as a console. This would be easy to support, using drivers that already work, but when the system sees the ID, it knows to run a getty session. Alas, such a standard is unlikely to take off, but it would be quite effective if it did: plug in your serial console into a USB port and off you go.
A serial console is sometimes the only way to install OpenBSD on certain systems and architectures, and until very recently that included some Raspberry Pi boards, as well as the Pinebook Pro. Things have gotten better, but there is still loads of room for improvement.
https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.7/arm64/INSTALL.arm64
I’ve been basking in the amber glow of my VT510 recently as I’ve been restoring a pile of mid-90s sun and vax machines. It’s a quality terminal and I enjoy using it. Smooth scroll is a thing of beauty.