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<H2><A NAME="s2">2.</A> <A HREF="Serial-HOWTO.html#toc2">Quick Help</A></H2>
<P>This repeats more detailed information found elsewhere. If your
computer can't seem to find your serial port and you already know
something about hardware resources (addresses like 3F8 and IRQs like
5) then try this: First, get into the BIOS (often called "setup")
when the computer is powered on by pressing certain keys. To find out
what keys to press, watch the screen as your PC starts up. If
the words that flash by on the screen too fast to read, freeze them
by holding down the "pause" and "shift" keys at the same time. Then
when read, hit any key to resume (cease pausing) and hold down the
key(s) required to enter the BIOS setup. You may have to try this
again since there may be more than one screen which you can freeze
with the "pause" key. Also, look for messages about the serial ports
on these frozen screens.</P>
<P>Once in the BIOS menus, try to find menus dealing with the serial port.
They could be shown in a menu dealing with Resources, Plug-and-Play,
Peripherals, Ports, etc. Some old BIOSs setups (before 1995 ?) didn't
deal with the serial ports. Make sure the ports you need are not
disabled and note how they are configured (like 3F8 IRQ 4). You may
need to change the configuration to prevent conflicts. There could be
a shortage of IRQs if the BIOS has reserved some IRQs that it didn't
need to reserve.</P>
<P>For serial ports to be found, either the kernel must have been
compiled with serial support, or serial support must be provided by a
module. To check this look in the file /boot/config-2.6... and search
for SERIAL. =m means it's a module and you may check to see the
modules that are being used by typing: lsmod.</P>
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