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

[Maarten Vanraes]

Op zondag 18 december 2011 11:54:17 schreef 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


theoretically, i'd be in favor of on-demand vt allocation, be it graphical or 
textbased.

i'd be ok with a session starting when going to other vt (default session, be 
it a dm or a textbased login.) however, the dm should allow to fall back to 
textbased, but there we run into a problem:

what if X is failing, you can't go back to text-login, so that's a nono

perhaps we could document that we'd preallocate F12 or something for text-
based emergency, but then noone would know...

I donno, if we don't have textbased by default, then surely vt1 has to be 
forcably text-based...


new X sessions are started from the old session, so i vote that CTRL+ALT+FX 
spawns a text-based login.