[Coco] CoCo came in handy as a terminal

[Joe Grubbs]

So... My primary server machine at home recently received a Linux upgrade. For file system duty, I decided to give the btrfs a try instead of ext4.

I had a power blip and was therefore unable to do a proper shutdown. Sadly I encountered a bug in the Linux kernel 3.19 wherein booting fails when remounting an unclean volume. For some reason even the emergency console wouldn't function properly. It would get far enough to display the login prompt, but then the display went blank (and the monitor went into standby). Later I found out the ATI display driver was crashing as well, but anyway...

Without a console, I thought I was out of luck. But then I tried connecting via ssh from another machine. No dice... networking and the dhcp client hadn't started.

Since I'm old fashioned, I always have a getty instance listening on my serial port, and at the time I had a CoCo2 connected. I wasn't expecting it to work, but I tried loading a communications program on the CoCo, and to my surprise I was greeted with a login prompt!

I logged in, started networking and the dhcp client, and proceeded to download kernal 4.0. I had to use wget and those obscenely long and complicated URLs to access the kernal images from the repo... typing that out on a 32 character wide display with mostly "lowercase" green on black characters was an exercise in patience (and eyestrain), but I got it. I installed them and rebooted. Voila! It all works now!

Sure I could have probably connected a more modern computer like my laptop, or even my Wyse 50, but by the time I realized that, I was already committed to using the CoCo.