As most current development machines don’t have serial ports, the usual setup is to use a USB-Serial-Converter. Some evaluation boards have such a converter on board. After connecting, these usually show up on your host as /dev/ttyUSB# or /dev/ttyACM# (check dmesg to find out).
On Debian systems, the device node will be accessible to the dialout group, so adding your user to that group (adduser <user> dialout) removes the need for root privileges.
The terminal manager screen can also be used as a simple terminal emulator:
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
To exit from screen, press <CTRL-A> <K> <y>.
A good alternative terminal program is microcom. On Debian it can be installed with apt-get install microcom, on other distributions it can be installed from source:
http://git.pengutronix.de/?p=tools/microcom;a=summary
Usage is simple:
microcom -p /dev/ttyUSB0
Having network connectivity between your host and your target will save you a lot of time otherwise spent on writing SD cards or using JTAG. The main protocols used with barebox are DHCP, TFTP and NFS.
The dnsmasq program can be configured as a DHCP and TFTP server in addition to its original DNS functionality:
sudo ip addr add 192.168.23.1/24 dev <interface>
sudo ip link set <interface> up
sudo /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --interface=<interface> --no-daemon --log-queries \
--enable-tftp --tftp-root=<absolute-path-to-your-images>/ \
--dhcp-range=192.168.23.240,192.168.23.250