No terminals in Mandriva 9.1

Zarniwoop79 · 07-19-2010, 01:37 PM

I run Mandriva 9.1, and everything is working fine except one thing. If I'm in X and press "Ctrl+Alt+F1" (or F2-F8, excluding F7), I don't get to a terminal. In one of the screens I get the startup sequence,but I don't have any terminals.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

camorri · 07-20-2010, 06:28 AM

Have a look at /etc/inittab file. There should be some lines that create the tty's when the system boots. It is a fairly common practise to edit this file and limit the number of tty's. You should be able to add some back it.

Here is what it looks like, with six tty's

Quote:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

I would expect you would need to restart the system to test, after you edit. Hope this helps.

Zarniwoop79 · 07-25-2010, 04:04 PM

Thanks, but unfortunately those lines are already in the /etc/inittab. I guess that for some reason they don't work. The weird thing is that it is the same both on my laptop and my desktop computer, both running Mandriva 2009 Spring.

Zarniwoop79 · 07-26-2010, 02:49 PM

It seems that the problem is somewhere in bootup process. Today I got a shell, but to do it I had to go through F1-F8 (except F7 of course), and at F8 some startups had failed. After pushing a few buttons (probably enter did it) I suddenly had terminals in F1-F6. It's not a great solution but it's a start.

Any ideas on what causes this? Everything else is working so if it pauses due to some problem it must be late during the bootup.

camorri · 07-26-2010, 03:51 PM

Open a terminal and run 'dmesg' and look for any error messages. That may give you a clew as to what is causing the problem.

Hope this helps.