Replacing getty with fgetty

[timothykaine]

How would one go about doing this? There is no actual package in Debian for getty.

Is there a "Debian way", or just manually?

[dkeav]

you must work on your skills young padiwan

[timothykaine]

Yeah I looked at that, but it still doesnt help me as the only one of those I have on my system is fgetty, which is the one I want, not the one that exists in my system that I *dont* want.

The only package on my system containing "getty" is fgetty, but its not in use, getty is.

[Gro$$]

If you have fgetty installed, you have to change your inittab file (/etc/inittab) to have it use fgetty instead of getty. So open up /etc/inittab in a text editor as root, and scroll down until you see something like this:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

and replace the word getty with fgetty and you should be good to go. Hope that helps.

-Gro$$

[bwkaz]

Check to make sure /sbin/fgetty exists first! If you don't, you won't be able to log in when you reboot.

It may be that the main executable of the "fgetty" package is actually named just plain "getty", too.

[timothykaine]

If you have fgetty installed, you have to change your inittab file (/etc/inittab) to have it use fgetty instead of getty. So open up /etc/inittab in a text editor as root, and scroll down until you see something like this:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

and replace the word getty with fgetty and you should be good to go. Hope that helps.

-Gro$$

First of all, yes, fgetty exists under /sbin.

Took this advice, and now when it starts X it repeats "could not chown/chmod tty device", then starts X/KDE, gets to the point of "initializing peripherals", then kills X, and starts X again, and is caught in this loop.

I will change inittab back to get functionality back, but would still like to solve this.

BTW, what has changed is that I am now doing this on Kanotix (also Debian Unstable, so shouldnt matter) and I replaced bash as the tty instead of replacing "getty".

The ultimate goal of this is to speed up Debian by using fgetty instead. This was advised by the Debian Wiki LinuxSpeedup guide. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?LinuxSpeedup

EDIT: It appears this is not what is causing the X-restart, that problem is caused by an unnamed bug in the new Unstable repositories. However, this solution still causes the message of "could not chown/chmod tty device". Please advise.

[timothykaine]

bumpity bump. Anyone?