What is agetty, and why can't it be stopped?
Greetings all;
This machine has only one serial port, which I normally use a session of
minicom to connect as a terminal quit a bit dumber than a vt102, to a
TRS-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement. But my normal config for
minicom is /dev/ttyS0, but it claims the device is taken.
Sure enough, an lsof|grep ttyS0 shows an agetty attached to it. And a
killall agetty as root only changes its pid until I've done the killall
as rapidly as I can uparrow and repeat it 6 or 7 times.
grepping thru /etc does not seem to find any hits, so I've no clue whats
starting it. So next I will do a search thru synaptic and remove it if
it will let me, or somehow disable it forever.
And the search for agetty in synaptic is also empty.
But as root, a locate agetty hits paydirt.
root@coyote:~$ locate agetty
/sbin/agetty
/usr/share/doc/util-linux/modems-with-agetty.txt
/usr/share/man/man8/agetty.8.gz
And the man 8 agetty page seems to indicate its a serial connection, I've
heard of as being available for troubleshooting even if its not fully
booted. Great, except I'm not sure I could go to the coco's keyboard and
run supercomm to see into linux, never tried it. In any event, the coco
is expecting a cr, and will respond by launching a shell bound to that
serial port on its end of the cable.
So what I'd like for it to do, is be totally silent during the rest of
this machines boot, and once a user, me, is logged in, go away just as
silently, freeing the only serial hardware port for my own use.
Next problem with minicom running as me is that it has no permissions to
save as its .dfl, the options it needs to Just Work as opposed to
messing around in its config screens finding a group of setting that
will work with the shells available on the coco, which of course is not
running its native rsdos, but a unix like system called nitros9 these
days. Its os9 plus a few shots of unix testosterone.
What do I do next to get rid of this nearly invisible agetty gizmo once
this machine is booted? It might be handy if this machine is truly
hung, but I can count those instances on one hand with fingers left over
in the 21 years I have been a linux only house.
Thanks all;
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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