Hello,

I just wanted to remind everyone that we now have a new serial
driver. We are now, as of Monday, using the Machine Independant
8530 driver, which is also used by the sun3, sun3x, sparc, 
and mvme68k ports. That's cool.

What's not cool is that a few things WILL BREAK. There are simple
fixes, you just have to use them.

The main thing is that this driver resets the serial port settings to
the default on each first open (when the port goes from inactive to
active). It didn't used to.

What will break is setups which assume that you can stty -f /dev/tty0X
some settings and have them stick. MY gs package on puma is one
such example, when talking to a DeskWriter.

The fix? 

1) if it's a serial printer, just add a "br#57600:" to the
printcap entry. It used to be that lpd didn't let you set the
printer to anything above 38400. Now (actually as of 1.2) it
does. So just set the baud rate to whatever, and you're fine.
Oh, the ms line in printcap will let you set modes for the printer
port (so "ms=-parity,-ixon,-icanon,-echo,-opost,cs8,crtscts" should
set the port for crtscts flow control (stop when we're asked to)
and do no processing of the output ("raw" mode).

2) for anything else (also for printers, but less elegant) is to
set the seial defaults in the booter. 1.11 can! You can set the default
baud rate, and set the serial port to put itself in "raw" mode when
first opened by setting the check boxes & rates.

Take care,

Bill