Can't start a terminal
 

As of today I can no longer start a terminal? When I try to load gnome-terminal, the window appears but it just stops with a flashing cursor and no shell. If I try to start xterm, the window comes up and goes away instantly.

This started happening after a system crash I had last night. X had hung on me, completely hardware lockup. I couldn't kill X with ctrl+alt+backspace, my mouse wouldn't move, and I couldn't ssh into my machine to get a shell. So the only thing I could do was hit reset.

After I hit reset, the system aborted during the boot process and said my /etc/fstab didn't exist. It gave me the option to press CTRL+D to continue, or type the root password to fix the problem. I first tried logging on as root to fix the problem only to find that the file system was mounted as read only. There was nothing I could so I rebooted and went with the CTRL+D option. All that did was tell me I had to reboot yet again.

So I put in my RH9 CD and used it as a rescue disc. I tried using the automated recovery but it didn't work. It said my file system didn't exist. At that point I had a sinking feelilng but I didn't give up. I manually mounted my Linux root partition from the rescue CD and from there was able to make a new /etc/fstab

Now - the point of telling you all of that is that I think my terminal problem could possibly lie in my rebuilding of the /etc/fstab?

Here is what I added to it:

/dev/hdb3 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb2 none swap sw
/dev/hdb1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 1

After I rebooted and got my system back, I breathed a sigh of relief. But during the boot process it told me I was missing /proc so I then added this:

/proc /proc proc defaults

Then I rebooted. At some point, redhat automatically added these lines for me:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

And finally, once everything was apparently working again, I added my other drives by adding these lines:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs gid=501,umask=0005,ro 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/external ntfs gid=501,umask=0005,ro 0 0


Am I missing something in the /etc/fstab that is preventing me from gaining access to the terminals from X? As I understand it, the terminals use some kind of virtual device to allow a user to connect. Something about DEVPTS ... is there a /dev/pts line that I need?

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I have already exhausted myself looking online for the answer.

Bah - nevermind. I guess I just needed to sit down and work through the problem by writing it down. Surely enough, the /dev/pts line in the /etc/fstab was exactly what my problem was. (Which I had not previously thought of until I sat down to write that message.) But anyway - as soon as I finished writing and submitting this question I googled for "devpts fstab" and found an example /etc/fstab file. I added this line to the end of my /etc/fstab:

devpts /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0


Then I did a mount -a and now everything is working again. Sorry for the post ... but maybe someone else will see it in the archives someday and it could help them out.