I was bored the other day at work, so I decided to see if I could get Linux to come up inside Microsoft Virtual Server.

I had a bunch of problems: with Debian/woody, I kept getting interrupt lost messages, and it was pig slow.

In the end, I went with Debian/sarge (the new installer) which was cool, and worked really well. I've since upgraded it to unstable, which is also working well.

What I'm trying to do today (while getting on with what I'm supposed to be doing) is working out how to compile a Debian-style kernel from the pristine kernel source, so that it's a drop-in replacement for whatever kernel-image I already have installed[1].

Because this thing's virtual, I can't use a normal serial terminal emulator. What I can do is connect the virtual serial port to a named pipe. So I'm wondering if anyone knows of reasonable terminal emulators that will talk to a named pipe instead of a COM port?

[1] I know how to use make-kpkg, but I'm trying to use the /boot/config-2.6.8-k7 file to build a new kernel that's configured identically to the old one (but newer). It won't come up. So I want to use a serial port.

Why? Because I'm trying to compile the ivtv patches against 2.6 without breaking everything else.

Are you using the ivtv releases from the website or the ones from Chris Kennedy & co?

One thought.. if your machine has more than one serial port, you could just loop back in via a null modem cable..