Troubles on Serial Communication with Debian Jessie

zipzit · June 9, 2017

I've been playing with Orange Pi Zero. I've been playing with both Armbian_5.25_Orangepizero_Ubuntu_xenial_default_3.4.113.img and Armbian_5.25_Orangepizero_Debian_jessie_default_3.4.113.img . I've been using a FTDI communication Serial adapter on a Mac Laptop via Terminal $ screen ≺port_name≻ ≺baud_rate≻ In my case the screen command looked like this: $ screen /dev/tty.usbserial-AE00BS5L 115200w

What I've discovered is when I'm using serial communications, tools like $ nano filenamee or $ nmtui , the system interface gets all screwed up. If you have the commands memorized, you can still use Nano (barely) but not so easy with nmtui. The screen overwrites in a weird method and you can't really read anything. This only goes awry on Debian Jessie, but works fine Ubuntu Xenial. Things work just fine on both image flavors if you login via a SSH connection.

Is this a bug? I do note Debian Jessie is no longer listed as prime on https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/ .