"Headless" Linux & agetty Issues

May 06, 2004 3 Replies
M

Hi,



I'm trying to setup a headless Linux system on a PC/104 board. I had some problems with the following error message ...



INIT: Id "S1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes



... which I solved by commenting out the lines in /etc/inittab that controlled the respawning of agetty on all the virtual consoles. It seems to work now, but there are some situations with my PC/104 board where I connect a video card to make troubleshooting easier. With my new /etc/inittab this won't work any more. Is there any way to set it up so that it will work under both configurations? Can it somehow detect if a video card is present and only do the respawn stuff if it detects one?



Any suggestions?



Thanks,



Mark


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J

Hmm.. 'S1' would refer to the agetty listening on the (secondary) serial port, not on any virtual console. So, if it's just 'S1' entry that causes problems, then by all means do comment out that entry.

Hmm.. not having a video card might very well make it so that not even the vc gettys can be started, because the vcs are anyway bound to the video card.

Hmm.. I think you could find the existence of the video card at least through lspci, and then do some magic to replace and reread the inittab file.

Wolf a.k.a. Juha Laiho Espoo, Finland (GC 3.0) GIT d- s+: a C++ ULSH++++$ P++@ L+++ E- W+$@ N++ !K w !O !M V PS(+) PE Y+ PGP(+) t- 5 !X R !tv b+ !DI D G e+ h---- r+++ y++++ "...cancel my subscription to the resurrection!" (Jim Morrison)
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N

I had a similar problem when I was testing the bare bones linux on a laptop prior to putting it on a DiskonChip

The laptop had an IrDA port on ttyS2 and was continually trying to handle logins.

It's probably not the problem you have but, it had me fooled for a while.

Juha Laiho wrote:

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B

One possible solution is to set another option instead of 'respawn' in your inittab file. (ie. "once" comes to mind)

Maybe cobble together some bash script that inittab launches and have that check if the video is present by searching /proc, if so execute getty, otherwise exit.

Check out 'man inittab' for some background.

-Barry

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