breaking news: old-school is NO gettys with X Re: Reasons to preseve X on tty7]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 11:58:36PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> I always thought it was odd it was on vt7 instead of vt1 or vt12. Why pick
>> one in the middle to be special. (Note that when I used to use vts I
>> had 12 configured.)
> It just happens to be the first free one.  I remember having virtual 
> terminals running Dell's version of SysV linux on a 486 box in the early 
> 90's.  Somebody probably copied their inittab file with 6 getty's...


I went and looked at the oldest inittab I could find online in a half-hour
of searching.

<http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/redhat/3.0.3/i386/trees/liveram/etc/inittab>

It has:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:1234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty1 VC linux
2:234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty2 VC linux
3:234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty3 VC linux
4:234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty4 VC linux
5:234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty5 VC linux
6:234:respawn:/sbin/getty tty6 VC linux

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
# x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/X11/xdm -nodaemon


That's right -- NO gettys configured in the X runlevel. None!

The new school *is* the old school!



And check out inittab from Slackware 1.1.2, dated 1994-01-27. It has the
following getty lines:


c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1
c2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2
c3:45:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3
c4:45:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4
c5:45:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5
c6:456:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6


# Runlevel 6 used to be for an X-window only system, until we discovered
# that it throws init into a loop that keeps your load avg at least 1 all 
# the time. Thus, there is now one getty opened on tty6. Hopefully no one
# will notice. ;^)
# It might not be bad to have one text console anyway, in case something 
# happens to X.
x1:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc.6

So again, no text vts with X, except for due to a bug.


-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect 
Cyberinfrastructure Labs
Computing & Information Technology 
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences