Picocom replaces Minicom

As I recently started to play with Solus Linux, discovered that minicom is oddly missing from the package repo. After some research, found that it was purposely omitted because its development has stopped some time ago according to Josh Strobl, the main developer for Solus Linux. While his responses seem a bit curt, I do see Solus to be very efficient, snappy and stable. Something that is not accomplished without proper focus i.e. a highly functioning OS supported by a lean eco-system.

I was accustomed to using minicom for decades after first discovering Telix, just like many of you, but decided to check out picocom to see if it would be easy enough to switch to. While the latter lacks a graphical even if only ANSI menu and UI, it will accomplish your serial port connection with minimal effort.

Well, both the man pages and a lil' hacking aka trial & error are your friend.

In the end, I simply wrote a quick bash alias and my needs are taken care of:

.bash_aliases or .bashrc

alias picocom='picocom --b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0'

—obviously adjust to your needs

Boom done, no drama needed 🤪