Kermit used to be nice and simple, but it’s kind of gotten out of hand. Due to Columbia’s licensing nonsense, packages like minicom can’t just integrate it and make things simple. Nooooooooo. It want’s to be some kind of power application. Fine… So after getting it (it’s called CKermit for Unices), you have to compile it. Why does the executable pop out as Wermit? I don’t know. They say that’s the Beta name, but where did it come from?

Here’s what I do to talk to my HP48 and do Kermit uploading and downloading:

set parity none
set flow xon
set file binary (or text)
set line /dev/ttyS1 (or whichever port you're after)
set speed 9600
set carrier-watch off
ROBUST

That’s it…after that, you can do a:

send <filename>

Or a:

receive

Or if you want to enter a terminal program:

connect

That part with the ROBUST is irritating. Apparently the Kermit folks got some bad press about slowness. They whined "we’re not slow, we just use conservative defaults". Well, because they felt so cheated, they cranked up the speed in the default settings of later packages. And guess what? It doesn’t work! So use the ROBUST directive to say, "Whoa, slow down and don’t screw this up!". There’s an intermediate step between ROBUST and FAST that also doesn’t work…