While entire flocks of penguins swear by minicom, I very much prefer the longevity of ckermit for all of my serial comms situations.

And since you are already using Linux, you could do a drive-to-drive copy or direct-to-drive installation rather than deal with the tedious upgrade "tools" that we are otherwise stuck with. I believe Roger (or was it peter?) recently posted step-by-step instructions for such.

Cheers