[Mageia-dev] ANN: X11 now starts on tty1

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Anssi Hannula at 18/12/11 10:32 did gyre and gimble:
> For the record, attached are three alternative [1] untested
> proof-of-concept patches that make kernel start on vt7.

Personally I'm not a fan of sticking to vt7. As I said in an earlier
thread, if the primary use case of the machine is graphical, then why
start at 7? It's an arbitrary choice that fitted in with other uses when
it was first introduced, but these days it's pretty backwards when
considered on it's own. The only reason to preserve it is out of habit
and I think that this is (generally speaking) the worst possible premise
to base decisions on. I mean, if we want to let people use fast user
switching easily they first have to learn first about vt switch command
ctrl+alt+Fn. Then they have to learn that the first login is on 7 and
the subsequent ones are on 8 etc. This doesn't make sense...

What *should* happen is that the first one is 1.. the second one is 2 etc.

When I'm in gnome, and I switch to tty2 for the first time, rather than
getty appearing wouldn't it be better if the gdm prompt appeared for a
second graphical login?

I'm not suggesting that we ditch text logins completely, but I'm just
saying that we should try and make things generally smoother if they
user has already opted for a graphical system.

Switching to e.g. 7 or 8 should maybe default to providing a text login
and gdm should maybe present a "give me a text login" option in which
case that X server quits and getty replaces it.

Anything unused should timeout and quit (e.g. a getty on tty2 unused
should exit and wait and be re-activated as appropriate later.

All these things are possible (maybe not without upstream support, but I
can ask Ray about the general plans here from a gdm perspective).


Just for reference this is how the seat extender USB things work. Little
thin clients that you plug into USB that give you a keyboard mouse and
display. When you plug it in for the first time, it registers a new seat
and then gives you a gdm login prompt. I don't think mutli user should
be much different from multi-seat in this regard.

> BTW, I know fedora uses vt1 for X, but what about other distros, e.g.
> Ubuntu/Debian?

I don't think they default to it but plenty people try to change it to
that according to Google.


Col



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Colin Guthrie
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