[Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty

Thu Mar 8 15:17:33 CET 2012

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+inittab has been replaced by agetty (the default choice upstream).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?
+
+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
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+