Re: Bizarre getty issue

[Pete Harlan <harlan@pointofchoice.com>]

> >Frederic: try installing mingetty (uses less mem and CPU anyway), then
> >change all the lines in inittab to use mingetty.  This should both solve
> >the problem and help you w/ resources.
...
> packages are done installing.  I'm curious, is getty, mingetty, etc, even
> slightly necessary?  Realistically, I wont be using a modem... this was

Getty is the process that prints "Login:" (or whatever) on your
virtual consoles; it's used for normal logins, not (usually) modem
lines.  ('mgetty' is more commonly used for modem lines; it has a lot
of nice features for managing them.)

Replacing 'getty' with a different getty is fine, but you should also
try to understand what problem caused init to be unable to run the
particular getty process.

The "disabling for 5 minutes" is just init's way to not waste a lot of
resources when something it's supposed restart keeps dying.  The
solution is to find out (by looking at /etc/inittab) why it's trying
to run something, why that thing is dying, and fixing the situation
(perhaps by taking the line out of inittab.)

--
Pete Harlan
harlan@pointofchoice.com