How can I prevent terminal boot messages from being cleared

[John Summerfield]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

>>> Any help would be much appreciated.
>>>
>> <shift>-PgUp and <shift>-PgDn I believe.
>>
> This will let you scroll back, with a couple of limits. One is that
> when you switch from one VT to another, you normally lose the
> scroll-back buffer for the first VT. I have not checked in a while,
> but the last time I tried it, shifting between a VT running X and
> one running the CLI would also do that. (Using a frame buffer for
> CLI is different, but is not the default on a PC.)
> 
> You can sometimes pause the display using Ctrl-S or the Pause key.
> Printing the screen from the CLI is harder. I used to use something
> like "cat /dev/vcs1 > screen.txt" or "cat /dev/vcsa1 > screen.vcsa",
> but a normal user can no longer do that. If you have gpm running,
> you can copy and paste using hte mouse buttons to save the text to a
> file.


One problem with gpm is when it's started, and the other is that some 
distros either dont' start it by default (I think Debian doesn't even 
install it!), or think one does not need it in runlevel 5.

In contrast, I hold to the view that too many consoles is barely enough 
and usually get to this point fairly quickly:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6
7:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty7
8:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty8
9:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty9
10:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty10
11:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty11
12:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty12


Some distros tie X to tty7 so that needs to be untied, and some syslog 
stuff to tty10 or so (an idea I commend) so that needs to be rearranged too.




-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu

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