Q Please can you tell me if there is a program such as HyperTerminal available for Linux?
A There is, although it is more common to use a remote login over an internet connection these days. For a dial-up terminal, there are a couple of options worth mentioning. Minicom (http://alioth.debian.org/projects/ minicom) is the most commonly used. It runs in a console, so may not be quite what you are looking for. Komport is a GUI based dialup terminal for KDE. It is available from http://komport.sourceforge.net as source code and packages for RPM and Debian.