I’ve been using minicom for doing serial device work. It was designed as a modem dial-up tool, but works fine for configuring switches, etc. Well, it turns out my new laptop didn’t have minicom, and for some reason fink under 10.4 doesn’t have it as a package (it can be built from source or downloaded as a staticly linked binary). Researching options, I stumbled across the seemingly obvious – screen(1) makes a fine terminal emulator for basic tasks. Just run screen /dev/serial-device and you’re off to the races, at 9600N81 by default. It takes parameters for other line conditions.