Reasons to preseve X on tty7

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Wed Oct 29 17:52:38 UTC 2008


Once upon a time, Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com> said:
> Because it was the number of getty tasks someone had in the example inittab
> for SysVInit I suspect. It is useful to have a couple even for debug hiding
> where you can direct a user but the number is arbitary and the fact X happens
> to be VT7 is just a further arbitary fallout from this.

I think 6 gettys goes back before SysVInit, maybe to SLS.

I used to boot in level 3, log in on tty1, and run startx to get X, but
I stopped doing that years ago.  However, from that time, on the rare
occasions I need a text console while in X, I switch to tty2, not tty1.
On my servers with serial consoles, I typically disable most of the
console gettys anyway.

Didn't somebody have an on-demand console daemon for Linux at some
point?  You'd just run it, and when someone switched to a new VT where
nothing was running, it would start a getty.  I always thought that
would be much better than an arbitrary 6.

I don't see this as a big deal.  I've been using X since before Linux
existed, and I just see non-X ttys (on a system running X) as an extra
thing (none of the other systems I've used X on support that; the
console is either text or X, not both).

The argument appears to be coming from a (very!) vocal minority (what
percentage of Fedora users are on this list, and what percentage of list
members are objecting?).  The vast majority of users have no idea or
care about VT switching in my experience and will not care that X
switched from one tty to another (if you tried to explain it to them,
you'd just get blank stares).  If it speeds up the boot process and
causes less flicker and monitor reset (which does disconcert regular
users), they'll be happy.

As for the argument that speeding up boot and making the boot smoother
is meaningless because you should never need to reboot, there are still
a lot of users that have to dual-boot.  Speeding up boot (and shutdown!)
is a good thing for them.

A better solution to this issue of "where is my X or text tty" would be
to allow console managers to register for a different set of keystrokes;
e.g. gettys could register for [CTRL-]ALT-F<1,2,...> and X for
[CTRL-]ALT-<1,2,...> (or something like that).  The first getty to
register would get F1 and the first X to register would get 1.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




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