After the kernel has finished booting you may see a console message such as "Please press Enter to activate this console" and when hitting enter a console prompt appear which may be signified by a character such as "#". An example output is shown below.
Sending DHCP requests .<6>eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0xCDE1 ., OK IP-Config: Got DHCP answer from 255.255.255.255, my address is 128.247.107.23 IP-Config: Complete: device=eth0, addr=128.247.107.23, mask=255.255.254.0, gw=128.247.106.2, host=128.247.107.23, domain=am.dhcp.ti.com, nis-domain=(none), bootserver=255.255.255.255, rootserver=128.247.107.35, rootpath= Looking up port of RPC 100003/2 on 128.247.107.35 Looking up port of RPC 100005/1 on 128.247.107.35 VFS: Mounted root (nfs filesystem). Freeing init memory: 136K init started: BusyBox v1.11.1 (2008-10-05 04:40:51 CDT) starting pid 288, tty : '/etc/init.d/rcS' System initialization... Hostname : OMAP3EVM Filesystem : v1.0.0 Kernel release : Linux 2.6.22.18-omap3 Kernel version : #12 Mon Oct 6 01:22:49 CDT 2008 Mounting /proc : [SUCCESS] Mounting /sys : [SUCCESS] Mounting /dev : [SUCCESS] Mounting /dev/pts : [SUCCESS] Enabling hot-plug : [SUCCESS] Populating /dev : [SUCCESS] Disabling Power mgmt : [SUCCESS] Turn off LCD after 1 hour : [SUCCESS] Mounting other filesystems : [SUCCESS] Starting syslogd : [SUCCESS] Starting telnetd : [SUCCESS] System initialization complete. Please press Enter to activate this console.The console message indicates that a UNIX shell has been started and you may enter commands through what is knowns as the command-line. If you do not see such a message or a prompt appear and you are unable to enter commands via the command-line after the kernel boots, then typically indicates that the start-up scripts in file-system are selecting the wrong tty interface for the console. For example, this article describes how to create a busybox root file-system for an OMAP3 device. If you refer to this section on configuring the file-system you will find that a file called /etc/inittab is created with the following contents.
::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS # /bin/ash # # Start an "askfirst" shell on the serial port ttyS0::askfirst:-/bin/ash # Stuff to do when restarting the init process ::restart:/sbin/init # Stuff to do before rebooting ::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/reboot ::shutdown:/bin/umount -a -r ::shutdown:/sbin/swapoff -aThe above file is executed once the kernel has booted and you can see near the top of the script a "askfirst" shell is launch on ttyS0. If you attempted to use this file-system as-is with a OMAP3 Beagle board that uses ttyS2 for console output then you would not see a console prompt after the kernel boots. This is easily corrected by editing the above file and changing ttyS0 to ttyS2.
