Most places seem to recommend ZTerm for use with the Arduino when on OS X (I'm running 10.5) but it seems like ZTerm has been kinda stale for some time, and rather not fork over $ for A) a dead product and B) for working on OS hardware 
I was wondering if anyone used anything else. I am not fearful of running any X11 apps or even console apps... I just want something good and open source!
Ray
I used "minicom", one of the standard open source unix things. I think it's a standard part of the developer tool or maybe the X11 install? Mine lives in /sw/bin, and I don't recall having to install it manually.
It works fine.
I think /sw is the root of the fink installation tree. It's not on my mac, and I have the developer stuff loaded.
I'm a dinosaur - I still use kermit. It was good enough for the Commodore 64...
-j
Could be; I do have some fink stuff installed. It was part of the "work" linux distribution that I had used recently, so it seemed natural to use it on macos as well..
Kermit brings back memories; Did you find macos-ready kermit, or did you have to modify/build it?
I do have minicom installed, so I'll give that a whirl... good call as for kermit.. wow that brings back memories, not all fond 
but I'll spark that one up too and see which one I like better.
I found a python serial modual which gives me all sorts of scripting capabilities that I didn't think of before, I'll report back if I have any success.
(ps, my arduino is shipping right now)
Ray
Did you find macos-ready kermit, or did you have to modify/build it?
Got a standalone binary from somewhere, but it's been so long I don't recall where.
-j
Its available via macports and probably fink as well.
I use screen.
screen /dev/tty.
ctrl-a k to quit.
I found a python serial modual which gives me all sorts of scripting capabilities that I didn't think of before, I'll report back if I have any success.
You can also easily do serial I/O from perl on the Mac. I have been logging some data from my Arduino with the code below. I based it heavily on a snippet I Googled...
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Device::SerialPort 0.12;
$LOGDIR = "/Users/peterl/Projects"; # path to data file
$LOGFILE = "plant.log"; # file name to output to
$PORT = "/dev/tty.usbserial-A20e1evB"; # port to watch
# Serial Settings#
$ob = Device::SerialPort->new ($PORT) || die "Can't Open $PORT: $!";
$ob->baudrate(9600) || die "failed setting baudrate";
$ob->parity("none") || die "failed setting parity";
$ob->databits(8) || die "failed setting databits";
$ob->handshake("none") || die "failed setting handshake";
$ob->write_settings || die "no settings";
# Send a string to the port
$pass=$ob->write("AT");
sleep 1;
# open the logfile, and Port
open(LOG,">>${LOGDIR}/${LOGFILE}")
||die "can't open smdr file $LOGDIR/$LOGFILE for append: $SUB $!\n";
open(DEV, "<$PORT")
|| die "Cannot open $PORT: $_";
select(LOG), $| = 1; # set nonbufferd mode
# Loop forver, logging data to the log file
while($_ = <DEV>){ # print input device to file
$theTime = `date`;
chomp($theTime);
print LOG $theTime . " - " . $_;
}
undef $ob;