On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Bradley Miller wrote:

> Can someone give me a quick way to test my serial ports in Linux?  I can't
> get my Peanut box to recognize my mouse . . . I don't know if it's a bad
> mouse or bad ports . . .  ? ? ? 

This will print out a list of what the serial driver thinks:

setserial -g /dev/ttyS? | less

Recognized, working ports will have details; otherwise it will list No
Such Device for that port.

While you can also use programs like minicom to swap bytes over the ports, 
simply echo'ing a string into the port would work too.  When I deal with a 
new piece of computer hardware, this consice troubleshooting section often 
saves the day:

http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Serial-HOWTO-15.html

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