If you are lucky enough to have a converter identifying itself using one of the common FTDI USB product IDs, then the serial device will simply appear. Drivers for other converters may also be present, but I have not used them.

Starting with 10.10, a driver for at least FTDI-based converters now ships with the OS.

You will need to install a third-party driver, e.g. These versions do not come with drivers for any USB to serial converter of which I am aware. I have found FTDI devices to perform more consistently. Of the two, I found the open source PL2303 driver to be slow and observed occasional data corruption (I did not try the closed source driver but heard worse things). For instance, two common chips include the FTDI series (official driver here) and the Prolific PL2303 chipset (open source driver here, closed source driver here). Given variability in driver quality and compatibility, you may want to try a few models and driver implementation. You probably want a USB to serial converter, of which there are a variety. The first step is to get an RS232 serial port on your Mac, which hasn't been built-in for a long, long time.

Apple II to Mac intelligent serial terminal file transfers.

N.E.R.D.: USB-to-Serial console for Mac (OSX).

using getty with serial port consoles.

Use a Serial Console with Mac OS X Leopard - The UNIX and Linux Forums.

Use an old serial VT100 terminal with OS X - Mac OS X Hints.

The technique described here has been reported to work at least as recently as 10.10.4.įor completeness, here are some links to several of the sites I encountered, which should give you the basic idea of the problem: I was working with 10.6, non-server edition. People have generally had more success with the Xserve OS X server versions. Many were quite old, and it appears that the process has gotten more difficult with more recent versions of OS X (at least Snow Leopard 10.5+). I first tried googling around, and I encountered a few references to this issue on various Mac forums. One of two things is generally meant by this, either using a Mac as the interface to a serial device (accomplished by running a terminal emulator program on the Mac), or using another machine to connect to the Mac over serial and accessing the shell provided by the Mac.

Setting up a Serial Console in Mac OS X Setting up a Serial Console in Mac OS X

Terminal emulator for mac os