5 copies of agetty running
 

when I run top I see that I have 5 copies of agetty running on my desktop system

Is there a configuration file somewhere that controls this? or does the system look at my hardware and assume this?

can someone point me to a document that tells about what the system starts and why?

A good start would be to post "What system you are running? "

jv2112 -
3.7.3-101.fc17.i686
Dick

I have done some research and I find they are virtual tty's tty2 -tty6

Further research in Wikipedia tells me what a virtual tty is. I experimented with ctrl alt f1 and sure enough I get a text console.

so now I understand what this is.

Unless I'm wrong the result is similar to init 1 except in that case the existing x system goes away - whereas in this case there are 2 systems or more running in parallel.

Question closed.