Turning a IIsi into a terminal for Mac OS X

E

ericskilling

Registered
Here's an interesting question. How do I turn a IIsi into a terminal for an iMac running on Mac OS X? The IIsi doesn't have ethernet so my iMac and the IIsi would have to connect if possible by the modem port. Is there any way I can forego the Mac OS alltogether on the IIsi and have it be a straight up terminal. BTW, I got the idea from a page on the MacAddict.com website but they didn't get into specifics. Keep in mind i'm a newbie so be gentle. :) Thanks in advance,
Eric
 
You should try researching some of the websites dedicated to older macs. I have seen some info about this on some of them, but i do not have the URLs myself.

Happy hunting
-jdog
 
I found some information here but it was more relevant to Linux. I'm no Unix guru so it's a bit difficult to apply the same idea to Mac OS X. Maybe someone could have a look at the article and reply back to the forum with some information.

Regards,
Eric
 
While I am sure that net BSD is a great system, I would prefer to use Darwin for this because frankly I'm very new to Unix and I need the Mac OS gui safety net if things get crazy :) That and hard drive constraints. When I get a new mac with a bigger hard drive I'll certainly consider putting another Net BSD on a seperate partition. Thanks for the help though.

Regards,
Eric
 
You could probably just run ZTerm on the old Mac. The challenge, of course, is that your new mac doesn't have serial ports.
 
This is where i got the whole idea for the project from. It does go outside the contraints of the contest because it's not a genuine hardware terminal but I'm sure the concepts involved are not that much different. I'm doing it as a personal project so I won't even be entering. Maybe it will inspire someone here :)

To me the difficult part will be getting the two to recognize each other through their respective modem ports.

Thanks for all the help :)

Regards,
Eric Skilling
 
In the stone age days I could connect 2 modems with a standard phone cable (point to point), ZTerm on each machine, and connect using null modem connection definitions. Walla, a terminal session between 2 machines.
 
Unfortunately, Darwin will not run on a Mac IIsi, it runs on PPC / sort of on x86. Nothing else. Darwin will not get you a Mac GUI anyway. If you want a GUI, the best you can do is to leave whatever Mac OS is on there.

NetBSD will run. If you want to run a UNIX OS on the IIsi, Net is probably the easiest to use, configure, etc., not to mention the only one that will run.

All in all, the suggestions to just use a null modem connection and something like zterm or even a telnet client on the Mac sounds most promising.

Keep us posted, this is a pretty cool sounding project...
 
So assuming I go the route of using a terminal program on the IIsi, How then would I set up the terminal program on the IIsi and how would I configure Darwin on my iMac so that it would be able to serve terminals through the modem port on each machine? Once again, Thanks. The NetBSD sounds intriging though. I'll check it out tonight. Thanks for the help

Eric
 
...and about not having a serial port on your new mac, you could try using KeySpan's USB-to-serial adapters.

I don't know if anyone's PCI cards with multiple serial ports work with OS X yet.

-Rob
 
if its possible to connect a mac os x mac to a IIsi via whatever (serial, usb, blabla), how do u get the z-term to tcsh connection? i thought this only worked over tcp/ip? :confused:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top