There are a number of communications packages available for Linux. Many of these packages are terminal programs, which allow a user to dial in to another computer as if she were sitting in front of a simple terminal. The traditional terminal program for Unix-like environments is kermit. It is, however, ancient now, and would probably be considered difficult to use. There are more comfortable programs available that support features such as telephone-dialing dictionaries, script languages to automate dialing and logging in to remote computer systems, and a variety of file exchange protocols. One of these programs is minicom, which was modeled after some of the most popular DOS terminal programs. X11 users are accommodated, too. seyon is a fully featured X11-based communications program.
Terminal programs aren't the only type of serial communication programs available. Other programs let you connect to a host and download email in a single bundle, to read and reply to later at your leisure. This can save a lot of time and is especially useful if you are unfortunate enough to live in an area where your connectivity is time charged. All of the reading and replying time can be spent offline, and when you are ready, you can reconnect and upload your responses in a single bundle.
PPP is in-between, allowing both interactive and noninteractive use. Many people use PPP to dial in to their campus network or other Internet Service Provider to access the Internet. PPP (in the form of PPPoE) is also, however, commonly used over permanent or semipermanent connections like cable or DSL modems. We'll discuss PPPoE in Chapter 7.
The Unix kernel provides devices for accessing serial hardware, typically called tty devices (pronounced as it is spelled: T-T-Y).
This is an abbreviation for Teletype device, which used to be one of the major manufacturers of terminal devices in the early days of Unix. The term is used now for any character-based data terminal. Throughout this chapter, we use the term to refer exclusively to the Linux device files rather than the physical terminal.
Linux provides three classes of tty devices: serial devices, virtual terminals (all of which you can access by pressing Alt-F1 through Alt-Fnn on the local console), and pseudo-terminals (similar to a two-way pipe, used by applications such as X11). The former were called tty devices because the original character-based terminals were connected to the Unix machine by a serial cable or telephone line and modem. The latter two were named after the tty device because they were created to behave in a similar fashion from the programmer's perspective.
PPP is most commonly implemented in the kernel. The kernel doesn't really treat the tty device as a network device that you can manipulate like an Ethernet device, using commands such as ifconfig. However, it does treat tty devices as places where network devices can be bound. To do this, the kernel changes what is called the "line discipline" of the tty device. PPP is a line discipline that may be enabled on tty devices. The general idea is that the serial driver handles data given to it differently, depending on the line discipline it is configured for. In its default line discipline, the driver simply transmits each character it is given in turn. When the PPP line discipline is selected, the driver instead reads a block of data, wraps a special header around it that allows the remote end to identify that block of data in a stream, and transmits the new data block. It isn't too important to understand this yet; we'll cover PPP in a later chapter, and it all happens automatically anyway.