Greetings,
  So I lost the disk on my thinkpad (current backup, fortunately).
Now I take the opportunity to load 1.5.2 (ex. Debian) on a new
drive.  The base install over ftp goes fine and I'm up in minutes,
thanks.

Now I come to a hack to get the machine to just log me in and 
fire up the X server since console security on this thing is
a non-issue.  The Debian hack sets up inittab with a line like

1:somerunlevel:/dev/sometty:/usr/bin/su - joeuser somescript: ...

instead of putting a getty on the tty.  So I'm setting up the
new system and it looks like I can do this with /etc/ttys and
a similar hack.  So far, no.  The man page says that it's
usually used to start gettys but "it can be any desired command"
I tried several things but came down to this

ttyE0	"/bin/sh"	vt220	on	secure

which fails with the init message:

init: getty repeating to quickly on port /dev/ttyE0, sleeping

There are 2 instances of init running now in the process table
so my guess is that init tried to if(!fork()) exec(...
and the exec failed (or so).

I expect that this has been done by some one, if there's a FAQ
entry, point me to it.

Wisdom solicited.

thanks
pjr

-- 
The real scandal is how useful I've become at vi.