Installing and using Debian with my decades-old genuine DEC vt510 serial terminal

It’s 2025, and yes, you can still install and run a modern Linux distribution like Debian through a real hardware terminal.

While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I’ve never before used it as a serial console all the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader.

This might be fun, I thought.
↫ John Goerzen at The Changelog

It seems Debian does a lot of the correct configurations for you, but there’s still a few things you’ll need to manually change, but none of it seems particularly complicated. Once the installation is completed, you have a system that’s completely accessible and usable from a hardware terminal, which, while maybe not particularly important in this day and age of effortless terminal emulators, is still quite a cool thing to have.