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If you are booting with a serial console, generally the kernel will autodetect this. If you have a video- card (framebuffer) and a keyboard also attached to the computer which you wish to boot via serial console, you may have to pass the console=device argument to the kernel, where device is your serial device, which is usually something like ttyS0.
You may need to specify parameters for the serial port, such as speed and parity, for instance console=ttyS0,9600n8; other typical speeds may be 57600 or 115200. Be sure to specify this option after “---”, so that it is copied into the bootloader configuration for the installed system (if supported by the installer for the bootloader).
In order to ensure the terminal type used by the installer matches your terminal emulator, the pa- rameter TERM=type can be added. Note that the installer only supports the following terminal types: linux, bterm, ansi, vt102 and dumb. The default for serial console in debian-installer is vt102. If you are using a virtualization tool which does not provide conversion into such terminals types itself, e.g. QEMU/KVM, you can start it inside a screen session. That will indeed perform translation into the screen terminal type, which is very close to vt102.