excuse my complete ignorance here...

I have a serial cable that i can plug from the serial port of the qube to a
serial port on my freebsd box.  It would be helpful for me to be able to see
the messages netbsd displays when the kernel boots.

What software should I use to communicate over the serial cable to the qube
from my freebsd box?

I'm quite happy to RTFM, but when i google for "Serial Console FreeBSD" all
i seem to get is information about installing freebsd from a serial console.

help?