11. Setting serial device addressesCommunications programs and utilities

Once you get everything working, you may want to check out these more advanced programs, all are available on the usual FTP sites, if they didn't come with your distribution.

• ecu - a communications program
• minicom - telix-like comm program
• procomm - procommish comm program with zmodem
• seyon - X based comm program
• xc - xcomm communications package

These programs offer more features than just kermit alone, including telephone directories, auto-dialing and so on.

• Another useful program is term. term multiplexes many connections over one serial line. It is somewhat similar to SLIP, and offers some SLIP functionality. These include rlogin, telnet, ftp, finger, rdate, xmosaic and tredir. tredir is a special program which lets you redirect remote TCP/IP ports to your local machine. This allows for remote NNTP, and SMTP access. The good thing about term is that is runs entirely in user space, meaning it requires no kernel support, or sysadmin support (like SLIP does).
• screen is another multi-session program. This one behaves like the virtual consoles.
• callback is a program that will have your modem call you back immediately from where you just called.
• mgetty+fax handles FAX stuff, and provides an alternate getty
• ZyXEL is a control program for ZyXEL U-1496 modems. It handles dialin, dialout, dial back security, FAXing, and voice mailbox functions.
• Other things can be found on sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Serial and
  sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/apps/comm or one of the many mirrors. These are the directories where all the serial type things are kept.