Adding serial and parallel ports

About serial ports

A serial card may contain several serial ports and may come with its own driver (a ``smart'' or ``intelligent'' card). A card may either be plugged into an expansion slot on the motherboard of your computer, or built into the motherboard itself. A serial card that does not have its own driver is known as a ``dumb'' card.

NOTE: Before adding a single-port serial card or a multiport expansion card, determine whether the card is a smart serial card or an SCO OpenServer-supported dumb serial card. If it is a smart card (such as the Arnet Smartport), the manufacturer will have supplied installation software and a driver. This should be all you need to add the card to an SCO OpenServer system. Follow the instructions provided with your card, referring to your computer hardware manual if necessary.

For ISA and EISA buses:: Support for a single-port dumb serial card on COM1 and COM2 is configured into the kernel by default. A single-port serial I/O card on COM1 will work as expected with an SCO OpenServer system provided it conforms to the standard IBM specification.
The serial driver in SCO OpenServer allows ISA serial ports on COM1 to use IRQ 4, and ISA serial ports on COM2 to use IRQ 3. Unlike the standard IBM interrupt scheme, however, the serial driver does not allow serial ports on COM3 or COM4 to share interrupt vectors with COM1 or COM2, and it does not support polling.
For the PCI bus:: All supported dumb PCI serial cards are auto-detected at boot-time, however, corresponding device nodes are not created until you run the Serial Manager or mkdev serial. If the Serial Manager does not list your PCI serial card, it may be an unsupported card, it may not be configured correctly, or it may require a driver from the manufacturer.

NOTE: An error message such as ``cannot create'' or ``cannot open'' is displayed if you attempt to access a serial port that is not physically installed and defined.