On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 11:34:57PM -0800, Michael Rueger wrote:
> 
> Ahem, just (re)learned something.
> I kept looking at tty?, not ttyS? ...
> 
> And the permissions weren't set correctly on those.
> But why were the getty's running on the tty's?
> 
> Confused but happy ;-)

Your Unix system is set up to support terminals or dial-in modems
on the serial ports. The getty's are waiting for incoming login
sessions. The permissions on your serial ports are set up to prevent
you from accidently using the ports for some other purpose (such
as Squeak) at the same time that the getty's are using them.
On Linux, see "man 1 getty" for an explanation.

There are various ways to make a serial port work for both incoming
logins and outbound connections (like your Squeak), and probably your
system already supports this. But unless you are actually planning
to support dial-in connections to your computer, you may want to
just turn of the getty's. If this is Linux, check the documentation
for your distribution. Usually you will just edit your /etc/inittab
and comment out the lines that start the getty's on the serial ports.
It's possible also that your system will be set up with different
runlevels, one with the getty's running, and another without. In that
case, you would just change runlevels, and you would not need to 
modify /etc/inittab.

HTH,
Dave