Hi,

I'm quite new with Debian and I'm having problems with running getty at the startup (so that I get text mode login screen). All I get is graphical login screen and when I try to switch to tty1 (Ctrl-Alt-1) my monitor just switches off (and this happens with all ttys). Same happens (naturally) if I kill the X server.

I have the following in my /etc/inittab

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

And also:

#which getty
/sbin/getty


My current runlevel is 2.

What else do I need to add or remove and where?

You have to remove the display manager you are using (kdm, gdm, xdm, wdm ...) then you will start in console mode. You can if you do not wish to remove the display manager entirely remove the symbolic link to it in the /etc/rc2.d/ directory or edit the file in the /etc/init.d directory and put exit 0 as the second line in the file and it will exit without running any other commands in the file when starting. But you have a bigger problem than that for some reason you are not getting a console at all. Using the CTRL +ALT + F1 should put you at the console without problems. So what kind of video card/hardware is in the machine? Do you see boot messages when you start?

OK, I got it fixed. I don't know what I actually changed from XF86Config file (I played with the settings a lot so i dont know which one actually helped ), but now it works. I have Radeon 7500, so I had updated xfree86 to 4.3.0 (testing) because 4.1.0 doesn't support it. I guess Xserver tried to load some wrong driver somewhere (config file was produced by xf86config).

And apparently console has been "on" all the time because when my monitor went blank I could still give commands and my HD led went nuts. My Radeon just wouldn't for some reason output any signal after I had switched from X to text-mode.

Well, now it works anyway...

Thanks for the help