On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 22:46, Matt wrote: > What exactly is the purpose of mingetty? It opens /dev/tty[1-6], and > runs the (text) login program? In X (VT7), I ran `ps aux` and noticed > that there were entries for `/sbin/mingetty tty[1-5]`. Why not tty6 as > well? Also, out of curiosity, I tried to `kill -9` the tty5 mingetty > process and switch to that VT, but the login prompt was still there. I > thought it would have been terminated - maybe just a blank screen in > place? On that note, what else is mingetty doing to keep running after > being killed? Have a look in /etc/inittab - the mingetty processes will be respawned (by the init process) should they die for any reason. You won't see a mingetty process if you have logged onto the VT associated with that mingetty, as (presumably) it execs the login shell. > > > Console input will only work on VT 1-6. You can of course change that > > though by altering the 'inittab' but be careful, and the X device > > moves from 7 to 8 and so on if you do it. > > > > Matt, are you still seeing a 'hang' when using virtual terminal 1-6 ? > > What exactly are you meaning by "console input"? A tty line outside of a > X shell environment? And yes, as per above, this problem is solved by > switching to VT1-6 and running the aforementioned command. But I do > wonder if this really is a feature..Many docs that mention exiting the X > server to runlevel 3 never specify the need to switch to a VT first. > > What are the key differences between a VT session and switching to run > level 3? I noticed that in a VT, all the processes associated with VT7 > were still running within that VT. OTOH, as expected, running in > runlevel 3 contains no X related processes such as gdm and > gnome-session. Switching to runlevel 3 will cause init to attempt to stop all services started in runlevel 5. It will do this by attempting to execute all the /etc/rc5.d/K* scripts. By default, the X display manager is started at runlevel 5, so runlevel 3 gets rid of X. VTs are just terminals you can log into. They are not affected by the runlevel. Cheers, Ben -- .O. Ben Stringer ..O ben@xxxxxxxxxxx OOO linux|java|majitek|gnu
