I am about to get a headless server. I have an old laptop that I'd like to use as a serial terminal.
The laptop will be off unless I need to access the server.
The goal is to set up this laptop to boot into minicom as quickly as possible, and background all of the other stuff - network initialization, and so - so that I can see what is going on. (the laptop is old and slow, and I don't want to wait on it to boot up for several minutes.)
Can anyone suggest a way to do this? I'm not sure how to go about backgrounding stuff but in such a way that it still boots in the right order...
--Yan