All of this has been discussed in the past on this mailing list.

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, David W. Robinson wrote:

>With some help from the list, I have NetBSD running now, for the first
>time on any machine. I'm impressed by how spare the OS is compared to
>Linux.
>
>However -- I have a coder's cable and I don't know where to start with
>it and with NetBSD. So, two things: can someone tell me how to perform
>an operation (any operation) using the cable between a DC and a Linux
>PC? And can someone tell be how I can set up SLIP (or whatever) to
>work over the cable, including how to configure the serial interface?
>
>I have reason to believe that the cable is OK, since I could at least
>make the screen flicker when using it in dclinux (though I had no
>further luck than that).
>
>Thanks.
>
>-- David Robinson
>
>