Serial Tips And Miscellany 12. Other gettys have similar options. You can also use tset , which can establish terminal characteristics when you log in, and doesn't depend on any defaults. If ls is screwing up your terminal emulation with the color feature, turn it off.
Some installations have ls set to use color by default.
Another program that will do this is called xprt . Do this for every serial port you want to auto configure. Be sure to give a device name that really does exist on your machine. This will improve responsiveness and will help eliminate overruns. Also have a look at a utility called irqtune that will change the IRQ priority of a device, for example the serial port that your modem is on.