I’m a fan of Devil Linux. It’s the first distribution I encountered that, by default, has no ports listening when you boot it up. As you might expect, this does hint at a less tailored fit in a desktop environment (in most cases), but is a great base for a network appliance.
As an appliance, many times it’s handier to be able to just jack in a serial cable from a laptop or an aux port than to cart around a display, keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, the live CD by itself doesn’t provide that console access. However, if you have saved a working configuration to storage media, it seems to be fairly trivial to do this – caveat emptor, I haven’t run full tests natively, only after running install-on-usb and installing to local disk media using syslinux with console option.
After running install-on-usb as noted above, I had serial access to the system once the boot was completed and the login prompt displayed on the real console. I proceeded to lose this access by replacing the etc-mods.tar.bz2 with my live configuration, and figured then that the changes must be contained within the saved mods. Here’s what I added back to regain console access (adjust your serial port name as necessary for your platform):
- To the end of /etc/inittab, add:
S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 9600 ttyS0 vt102 - To /etc/securetty, add:
ttyS0
Don’t forget to save-config – reboot (reinit?), and you should have a working serial console. Lots more room to play and improve these, but this is sufficient for my needs at this time and may help someone else down the road.