[Mageia-dev] musical session locations

Tue Feb 5 12:24:40 CET 2013

'Twas brillig, and Felix Miata at 04/02/13 21:56 did gyre and gimble:
+>> I think that startx and init are deprecated in favour of proper systemd
+>> commands now.
+> 
+> Init at shell prompt is shorthand/alias for insanely long non-memorable
+> systemd replacements for telinit/init.
+
+"init" still works for now. It likely will for as long as we have some
+degree of runlevel mappings - I can't see these going away anytime soon
+as there is no real need.
+
+I still think "systemctl default" or "systemctl start graphical.target"
+is semantically clearer and thus likely easier to remember than the
+entirely abstract "init 5" which, although shorter, it's semantically
+meaningless by itself. That said, with both you need some degree of
+knowledge anyway and thus the net difference in terms of such things is
+likely zero overall.
+
+> Startx may be deprecated, but no one who's told me so has suggested
+> what's supposed to replace it to get 2nd, 3rd & more X sessions going on
+> :1, :2, etc.
+
+It's a deprecated technique, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still
+work. Nothing will specifically replace it, other than the functionality
+already built into the Desktop Environments for many years where you can
+do "Fast User Switching" or "Login as another User" which will
+automatically start another X session on :1 or :2 as needed.
+
+Logging in multiple times as the same user is something that's,
+generally speaking, not officially supported by most of the DE's these
+days - i.e. trying to login as yourself during "Fast user switch" will
+often just switch you back to and unlock your original session.
+
+>>> On current
+>>> boot I used 3 on cmdline, logged in on tty2 & tty3, did startx on tty3,
+>>> and found X is running on tty3. On exiting the X session I did init 5.
+>>> That put KDM on tty1. On openSUSE & Fedora the problem is essentially
+>>> the same, e.g.: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=768788
+> 
+>> I don't think this is grub2 related.
+> 
+> Of course it's not. It's fallout from incomplete migration from sysvinit
+> to systemd. Systemd is designed to not do a significant number of things
+> that sysvinit did do, so things are broken that haven't been modified to
+> do what the functioning init system no longer does, or account for
+> everything the replacement init system does differently.
+
+Citation needed. What are these "significant number of things" that
+sysvinit did?
+
+>> Graphical desktop should default to tty1 now
+> 
+> I have predfined uses for ttys 1-6. 7, 8 & 9 are where my X sessions
+> belong, not on 1 and random others making me guess each time what lives
+> where. Tty1 especially needs not to be where X goes, because it's where
+> in help forums everyone dealing with non-working X is told to login to
+> do this and do that to troubleshoot.
+
+Oh jeeze, this was discussed prior to Mageia 2. I'm really not going to
+entertain such nonsense now. If you want it different, then fine - knock
+yourself out, edit all the various things you need to edit (this
+includes modifying multiple DM configurations and also editing the
+default prefdm.service file to ensure it doesn't conflict with
+getty at tty1.service and also (likely) statically starting
+getty at tt{2,3,4,5,6}.service also if you want these pre-launched (thus
+blocking any future X11 from being launched there.
+
+It's your system, you can do what you want with it, but OOTB we will be
+trying to provide a logical user experience that is not tied to some
+historical, syntactically and logically irrelevant concept.
+
+Things are far more complex than they used to be with multiple seats
+being dynamically added and removed and DMs have to cope with a
+multitude of different conditions. Things have to be reexamined and
+rethought from time to time.
+
+
+> More about what systemd doesn't do that init did. Initab reserved ttys
+> 1-6 leaving 7+ free for X sessions. Systemd reserves none and doesn't
+> even start a getty until switch to a tty is made.
+
+Yup, that's the OOTB behaviour. Don't like it? Fine, you are free to
+configure things that way:
+
+sed 's/^\(Conflicts=\)/#\1/' /usr/lib/systemd/system/prefdm.service
+>/etc/systemd/system/prefdm.service
+systemctl --system daemon-reload
+systemctl -f enable prefdm.service
+
+# systemctl enable getty at tty{2,3,4,5,6}.service
+# The above should be made to work, but it doesn't currently - patch pending
+for tty in 2 3 4 5 6; do ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/getty at .service
+/etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/getty at tty${tty}.service; done
+
+
+Reconfigure your DM to start on tty7 and you're done.
+
+That said, the whole VT concept is slowly dying anyway. Talks like this
+at FOSDEM highlight this:
+https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/kmscon/
+
+I'm afraid that if you want to keep such systems long into the future,
+you better start keeping the current versions of distros around. The
+only thing certain here, is change!
+
+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/
+