If you’ve read my previous articles, you know I love to manage my linux computers through their serial console. For the most part it works until you get into curses/TUI interfaces. After a bit of digging, Debian uses a vt220 terminal (changed from vt100). In most consoles this wouldn’t be an issue. However when using conman the terminal is inherited from the shell you are running at the time, in my case xterm.
There are a couple ways to do this. This is important to find out what term your shell program is running before using conman. Also important when you connect to the console to see what it’s setup for.
echo $TERM
printenv | grep TERM
This is the piece of code you need to insert:
[Service]
Environment="TERM=xterm"
This can be done with with the edit command to set the TERM on ALL serial ports:
systemctl edit serial-getty@.service
OR, specifiy a specific port:
systemctl edit serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service
The resulting file can be found in:
/etc/systemd/system/[service name].d/override.conf
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart [service name]
| Created: 2026-01-02 | Modified: 2026-01-02 |