[Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty

JA Magallón jamagallon at ono.com
Fri Mar 9 02:40:25 CET 2012


On 03/08/2012 03:17 PM, Colin Guthrie wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since switching to systemd, the mingetty we used to default to in
> inittab has been replaced by agetty (the default choice upstream).
>
> The question is should we switch it back to mingetty?
>

Lookin other things I also looked at agetty manual, and found a couple
useful things:

o      Optionally displays an alternative issue file instead of /etc/issue.

o      Optionally does not ask for a login name.

o      Optionally invokes a non-standard login program instead of /bin/login.

This looks ideal for the case where prefdm fails and you want to show
a big barner about it on tty1, or even drop the user direcly into
drakx text mode without any login. Perhaps it can be done in prefdm
if launching DISPLAYMANAGER fails.

So, if space or memory is not an issue, I will go for agetty in both
systemd and inittab.

> An argument against mingetty is that the current support in systemd will
> automatically work over serial consoles. With embedded systems and such
> more common these days, this might actually be a common situation (for
> very small values of "common" of course!).
>
>> From the man page of mingetty:
>
> mingetty is a minimal  getty  for  use  on  virtual  consoles.   Unlike
> agetty(8),  mingetty  is  not  suitable  for serial lines.  I recommend
> using mgetty(8) for this purpose.
>
>
> So if we switch to mingetty in getty at .service we'll be sacrificing
> serial console support.
>
> Have people got strong opinions on this? Can anyone remember why we
> ended up defaulting to mingetty in the first place?
>
> Col
>
> PS I'm aware of some "strange" behaviour on the current gettys. When on
> a getty you can use the cursor keys and move the cursor around. Keys
> such as backspace don't seem to work if you mistype your username or
> password (I'm pretty sure this used to work, but maybe I'm
> misremembering?). This is slightly improved with mingetty - in that the
> cursor keys don't move the text entry area, but they do print
> non-printable characters that still can't be deleted. I'll try and make
> this nicer, but it's probably not the highest priority problem on my list :p
>
>


-- 
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>        \               Winter is coming...


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