Serial ports are a thing of yesteryear, but never seem to go away. If you have a USB adapter that exposes serial ports to your favorite Linux branch, knowing how to get to them isn’t intuitive.

puTTY is a great terminal emulator, and you can connect to whichever port is exposed using the following format:

sudo putty /dev/ttyUSB0 -serial -sercfg 115200,8,n,1,N

If it’s on a different port, use /dev/ttyUSB1, etc.

As for cables that expose a serial port via USB, I recommend the Sabrent USB 2.0 to Serial (9-Pin) DB-9 RS-232 Converter Cable using the Prolific Chipset.