Depending on what Raspbian version you are running on your Pi, the approach for enabling a serial tty login via a VT terminal differs, but on current/recent versions you can enable by enabling and starting this systemd service (steps from this post, and here):
sudo systemctl enable serial-getty@ttyUSB0.service
and then:
sudo systemctl start serial-getty@ttyUSB0.service
This assumes you are using a USB serial dongle and that it’s connected as /dev/ttyUSB0. You can check by doing a ‘ls /dev/ttyUSB*’ before you connect your USB serial adapter and after to check what device your USB dongle appears as.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.kevinhooke.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20210917_174624.jpg?resize=525%2C394&ssl=1)
If you’re running an older version of Raspbian not using systemd, you can add a line to /etc/inittab to initialize getty as described here.
Kevin
I connected USB serial device as stated and the login works.
When I reboot the PI there is no login prompt we need to add a note on how to make this permanent.