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How to have socat open a listening socket in the file system?

Dear Lazyweb, can anybody with some advanced socat-foo tell me the command line needed to have socat create a socket in the local file system and to listen on it, so that I can have Virtualbox connect a virtual serial console to it?

The material available on socat on the web is sparse, and virtualbox-related docs usually contain "tick the create pipe option", which is not helpful here since I would like to see the first output the virtual machine prints to its serial port. It would be vastly more useful to have the socket already created with socat listening so that I can immediately see what is being printed to the socket.

Unified Kernel for etch, lenny and sid

Traditionally, the Linux kernel is software that I compile myself from pristine upstream sources for various reasons. I have three major kernel flavours that get built (server, desktop and notebook), and I am pretty current in running a bleeding edge kernel. This is not really necessary any more nowadays, but it's a tradition that works pretty well.

My kernels get built on sid and are packaged up with kernel-package, and equivs builds a dependency helper package which pulls in the kernel's dependencies such as initramfs-tools and takes care of cross-version updates like going from 2.6.29 to 2.6.30. Up to now, I was always able to run a kernel built this way on all my systems which can range from oldstable to unstable.

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