# serial ports stopped working

## Moriah

<GRIPE>

Sorry to post something that must certainly have been answered many times before, but the forum search query language is pretty puny, as I can only search for the OR of all the words in the little "Quick Search:" box, and "serial" and "port" come up a lot more often by themselves than "serial port" comes up as a phrase, so it becomes overly tiresome to search the search results

</GRIPE>

Anyway...

I need to use the serial ports on a machine.  I rebuilt this machine last month because of a dead disk drive.  The serial ports /dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttyS1 used to work on it, but now the devices are not even in /dev, so minicom gets pretty upset.    :Sad: 

What do I need to do to make them work again?

PS This is a painful machine to reboot because of all the stuff that needs to be started up again manually.  I expect a kernel build will likely be in order here.  If there is a way to do it with loadable modules without a reboot, that would be really great.    :Idea: 

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## geki

the search function does not like me either. therefore I use google with this search, i.e. for "serial port"

 *Quote:*   

> site:forums.gentoo.org serial port

 

okay, back to topic.

check kernel setup:

 *Quote:*   

> dmesg|grep tty

  *Quote:*   

> zgrep SERIAL /proc/config.gz
> 
> # or
> 
> grep SERIAL /boot/config-<your kernel config>

 

if the kernel setup shows ttyS?s you may set them up with:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Serial-HOWTO-12.html

maybe that helps?  :Rolling Eyes: 

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