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IBM's AIX Operating System

Chris Lewis, Harald Milz and Michael Staats have done excellent work on porting mgetty to AIX. Since then, I have taken over and actively use mgetty+sendfax on AIX for customer systems, and everything is very well tested now.

On AIX, many people do not want to manipulate `/etc/inittab' directly, instead, use some system administration tools (like 'smit'). To ease mgetty installation on AIX, Michael Staats has provided a small shell script, inittab.aix, that will help you setup your `inittab' after you've run make install. Just call it with the name of the tty you're modem is connected to, e.g.

./inittab.aix tty0.

I have received a couple of problem reports on AIX 4.1 where "suddenly" the modem line stopped working and all mgetty reported were error messages. If that happens to you, set toggle-dtr no in `mgetty.config'. AIX 4.1 doesn't seem to like programs that fiddle with the modem control lines.

Christoph Brinck (cb@medat.de) has also reported that it's necessary to enable the "dtropen line discipline" for the serial line you're using (whatever that may mean). This is done with the command:

chdev -l 'tty1' -a flow_disp='rts'
chdev -l 'tty1' -a open_disp='dtropen'

or via the `chgtty' part of SMIT (but I think that's the default setting for new ttys anyway).

Hardware and Software flow control work fine on AIX 3.x and AIX 4.x now.


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