Re: No available ptys

[USM Bish <bish@nde.vsnl.net.in>]

Thanks for this info. This was education for me since I know
very little about device files and pseudo filesystems.

The error seems to be elsewhere, since after changing the fstab
I get the message "mount: devpts already mounted at /dev/pts".
My /etc/init.d/devpts.sh is in place and obviously has done its
job during booting.

I did a bit of study of my /dev directory and discovered that pts
is a directory within it. To my surprise it showed a size of zero.
Kind of wondering what others have in their debian boxes.

drwxr-xr-x root    root        0 Jan 21 13:08:32 2001 pts

I also have Slackware-7 installed on a different partition on the
same box. Though the ownerships and permissions of /dev/pts
directory were identical. This, however, showed a size of 4096.

drwxr-xr-x root  root     4096 Apr 21 11:10:27 1999 pts

Could this be the genesis of the problem ? If yes, how does one
go about sorting the problem out ?

USM Bish



On Sat, 20 Jan 2001 19:20:40 +0100
"J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" <jhm@cistron.nl> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 20:38:57 +0530, bish@nde.vsnl.net.in wrote:
> >    The error message I receive is  "xterm: no available ptys".
> 
> > c) I cannot run the "script" program as user. As root there are no 
> >    problems. The error message I get is "openpty failed". This happens
> >    in "X" as well as in console mode.
> 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, that even mc and mcedit complains:

"subshell.c: couldn't open master side of pty
 pty_open_master: Bad file descript"

> I suspect you don't have the "devpts" pseudo-filesystem mounted. Try adding
> something like
> devpts          /dev/pts        devpts  gid=5,mode=620          0       0
> to /etc/fstab.
> 
> On Debian, libc6's /etc/init.d/devpts.sh takes care of mounting the devpts
> pseudo-filesystem.
> 
> HTH,
> Ray