[Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty

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 inittab has been replaced by agetty (the default choice upstream).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
+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/
+