-- Configuring Linux to work with UART based serial cards (9-8-99) --

1. Install the ISA or PCI serial card into the Linux machine
2. Boot Linux
3. If the card is configured for standard (COM1 - COM4) addresses,
   Linux should automatically detect and configure the card.
4. If the card is not configured for standard addreses:
    - Create the serial devices in the /dev directory.  Refer to the 
      Serial HOWTO (section 6.8: Serial Port Devices and Numbers 
      In /dev) for instructions on how to do this.
    - Use "setserial" to configure the card.  Refer to the Serial 
      HOWTO and to the "setserial" man page.  It might be necessary 
      to save the port settings to a (distribution specific) 
      configuration file (ex: /etc/serial.conf in the RedHat 
      distribution).
         
        
Linux Serial HOWTO:
The HTML files in this directory are a copy of the "Linux Serial HOWTO".
Open the file named "Serial-HOWTO.html" to browse the serial HOWTO.
Updated versions of these files can be obtained at the following address:

	http://www.linux.org/help/howto.html

Even though the information contained in these pages is sufficient to 
install and configure most UART based communications cards, we did not
author and do not maintain these pages.


PCI Support:
IMPORTANT:
PCI serial cards are only supported by kernel versions newer than 2.2.0.

In order to correctly install a PCI serial card, you will need to 
extract the PCI install scripts.  To do this, copy pci_inst.tar.gz to the
desired directory and type:

tar -xzf pci_inst.tar.gz

This will extract 3 files into your working directory:
  serialsetup
  setserial_pci
  pciutils-2.0.tar.gz

In order to start configuring your PCI cards, call the serialsetup 
script by typing:
  ./serialsetup

Serialsetup is a script that will examine your PCI configuration and
recommend the best configuration.  You will still need to manually modify
your serial configuration file (just as if you were installing an ISA
card), but serialsetup will recommend the optimal 'setserial' 
configuration lines.

Setserial_pci is a script similar to serialsetup.  Instead of informing
you of the optimal configuration, setserial_pci will automatically make
the setserial calls for you.  It is possible to call this script from
your serial configuration script instead of adding the setserial lines
manually.

pciutils-2.0.tar.gz is the PCI Utilities package.  This probably won't
be necessary to install, but if you have problems detecting the PCI cards,
or if your Linux distribution does not support PCI, then you can try
installing this package.


Tested Configurations:
RedHat v6.0, v6.2
Debian GNU/Linux (all versions since Hamm)
Slackware v4.0
Caldera OpenLinux v2.3

Distributions which were not supplied with a 2.2 series kernel were
upgraded to v2.2.13 from ftp.kernel.org.

Caldera's default kernel setup does not have extended serial port options
compiled in.  You must recompile your kernel to add this support.  Please
refer to the Kernel-HOWTO, which should be available in /usr/doc/HOWTO/ 
on your machine.  It is also available from 

	http://www.linux.org/help/howto.html

If you "make menuconfig", you will find the appropriate serial port settings 
under "Character devices", listed as "Support for more than four serial 
devices" and "Support for IRQ sharing".