Re: /etc/ttys questions (was Re: Making the keyboard work)

[Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > 2. How does /dev/console interact with /dev/ttyE0 ?  If I'm using
> >     wscons, should I have ttyE0 enabled instead of console?  Or in
> >     addition to console?
>
> Well, that depends on which device /dev/console is attached to!  :-)
>
> If ttyE0 is attached as the system console then you should only have a
> getty enabled on one or the other.

OK, I checked, and getty is running correctly on /dev/console as shown 
here:

        #  ps -Ao user,pid,tt,command | grep getty
        paul    29211 ttyp4  grep getty
        root      210 ttyE0  /usr/libexec/getty Pc console
        root      339 ttyE1  /usr/libexec/getty Pc ttyE1
        root      596 ttyE2  /usr/libexec/getty Pc ttyE2
        root      629 ttyE3  /usr/libexec/getty Pc ttyE3
        #

> > 3. With Xorg, even though my /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers file specifically
> >     says to run the Xserver on ttyE4 (vt05), it seems to start on ttyE0.
> >     This seems to cause getty some problems, and I keep getting "getty:
> >     repeating too fast" messages.  (These messages get trapped by my
> >     xconsole session, but do NOT seem to be recorded by syslog in the
> >     /var/log/messages file.)
>
> If you have no getty on ttyE4 then you cannot get messages from init
> about getty re-spawning too fast when xdm takes over ttyE4.  Either
> something else is causing the warning messages, or you do have a getty
> enabled on ttyE4.

Hmmm, I looked into this closer, and found that this was happening on 
only one of my machines.  It turns out the /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers was 
fubar on this machine:

        :0 local /usr/X11R7/bin/X :0 vt05

extra word here ------------------^^

which obviously meant that the Xserver was NOT running on vt05.  :) 
After correcting this, everthing is normal now.

I wish I knew how that extra ":0" got there in the first place.  :)


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