How To Install picocom on CentOS 8

picocom is Minimal serial communications program

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install picocom on CentOS 8.

What is picocom

As its name suggests, [picocom] is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program. It is, in principle, very much like minicom, only it’s “pico” instead of “mini”! It was designed to serve as a simple, manual, modem configuration, testing, and debugging tool. It has also served (quite well) as a low-tech “terminal-window” to allow operator intervention in PPP connection scripts (something like the ms-windows “open terminal window before / after dialing” feature). It could also prove useful in many other similar tasks. It is ideal for embedded systems since its memory footprint is minimal (less than 20K, when stripped).

We can use yum or dnf to install picocom on CentOS 8. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install picocom.

Install picocom on CentOS 8 Using dnf

Update yum database with dnf using the following command.

sudo dnf makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install picocom using dnf by running the following command:

sudo dnf -y install picocom

Install picocom on CentOS 8 Using yum

Update yum database with yum using the following command.

sudo yum makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install picocom using yum by running the following command:

sudo yum -y install picocom

How To Uninstall picocom on CentOS 8

To uninstall only the picocom package we can use the following command:

sudo dnf remove picocom

picocom Package Contents on CentOS 8

/run/lock/picocom
/usr/bin/picocom
/usr/lib/.build-id
/usr/lib/.build-id/68
/usr/lib/.build-id/68/c69f828067af57b20c55973f545dfd5e42535e
/usr/share/doc/picocom
/usr/share/doc/picocom/CONTRIBUTORS
/usr/share/doc/picocom/LICENSE.txt
/usr/share/doc/picocom/README.md
/usr/share/man/man1/picocom.1.gz

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install picocom on CentOS 8 using yum and dnf.