Raspberry Pi, serial console, minicom, and gnome-terminal

Question

I'm trying to access my raspberry pi via its serial console on the gpio pins. It's working fine through a USB-3.3v serial dongle. However, there's a problem with long lines and long screens not displaying correctly. I'm running minicom in a gnome-terminal which is not set to 24x80 columns (and gnome-terminal's Terminal/1 (24x80) option) doesn't help.

It's as if minicom completely ignores the sigwinch it must be getting, and/or has no way to send that over the serial line to change the terminal type.

Not a valid/answer or solution, but I find putty works quite well as a serial terminal in linux. — jordanm, Jan 24 '13 at 01:58
There are other minicom alternatives possibly worth trying (the thread mentions cu, screen, seyon, conserver and kermit) — sr_, Jan 24 '13 at 07:47
I did some experimenting with xterm vs gnome-terminal, and screen vs minicom. None of them change it. I'm concluding that the problem is on the Debian end, where it's not emitting the correct terminal escape codes. — Russell Nelson, Mar 27 '13 at 16:32
May be a solution here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/106644/how-to-change-the-width-of-remote-serial-console — , Mar 25 '16 at 13:38

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 14 '13 at 08:04

2

You're right, in that minicom won't communicate the fact of a window change to the far end. If you're using a VT100-like emulation, you might be able to do a

eval `resize`

to generate some control characters that will force the emulator to tell the far end the size of its window.

On Debian-like systems, resize is in the xterm package.

answered Aug 14 '13 at 08:04

Flup

8,145

1

At least with zsh and bash it's sufficient to call resize as-is. I don't need to eval its output and the shell correctly adjusts the LINES/COLUMNS variables on its own. – maxschlepzig Mar 07 '18 at 14:58

Raspberry Pi, serial console, minicom, and gnome-terminal

1 Answers1