[Mageia-dev] agetty vs. mingetty

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 14:17 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:

> So if we switch to mingetty in getty at .service we'll be sacrificing
> serial console support.

Web hosting companies sometimes provide access to a serial console.


> 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

In "Mageia Release 1" (and Mandriva) backspace does work, but cursor
keys will just insert esc [ A or whatever, with the ESC printed as ^[.

BSD systems did this from 4.1 or maybe earlier (1980 or so), except it
was DEL rather than BS to erase a character.  Version 7 Unix had # and @
as erase character and back-to-start-of-word, not the DEC-style del and
^u.

But maybe that's going back further than you meant ;-)

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
The barefoot programmer