[Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Fri Mar 9 11:05:53 CET 2012


'Twas brillig, and JA Magallón at 09/03/12 01:40 did gyre and gimble:
> 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 inittab has been replaced by agetty (the default choice upstream).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.

To play devils advocate (I would personally prefer to just use agetty!),
mingetty does support at least the second two as well.

> 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.

See the latest initscripts+systemd package. This is exactly what I've
done! Great minds think alike I'd say! (tho' I'm using mingetty for now
- partly because I wanted to play with it - I do intend to use agetty
instead however)

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

I'm not sure how much of a space saving it is, as the mingetty package
is only 34k. But every little helps :)

And while it does use more memory, I'm not sure anyone would
particularly lose all that much sleep over it (I think my previous
argument was a little weak!) :D

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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