Saturday, March 3, 2007

Old Mac 68k as an LCDproc display

I am easily amused I suppose. Trying to find a use for the old compact Macs I have around (Macintosh 128K, 512k, SE, SE/30), I set up a connection (see below) to my G3 and ran the LCDproc daemon from the old Mac using curses as a display. Using my GrowLCDprocDisplay program, you can even display your currently playing iTunes songs!

Basic steps for a serial connection:

  1. Get a USB serial adapter and the appropriate driver for Mac OS X
  2. Use a null modem cable to connect the old Mac and your new Mac
  3. Run an old terminal emulation (Zterm, MacTerminal, MicroPhone) program on the old Mac
  4. Set up the /etc/ttys file to allow you to login over the serial connection. for instance:
    tty.usbserial "/usr/libexec/getty local.9600" vt100 on
  5. Restart launchd: sudo killall -HUP launchd
  6. Login from the old Mac and run LCDd with curses as the display

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