On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 14:35:25 -0400, Lew Pitcher wrote:

<snip about terminals/consoles>

Thanks Lew, I didn't know any of that. Quite interesting, and probably
good to know at some point!

> Now, where is your X session? If you don't tell X otherwise, it starts
> the X session on the first free console after the last used one. In
> other words, without any overriding instructions, in this case X will
> start the session on tty7, and you'd get to tty7 through
> [<ctl>]<alt><F7>.

So, does that mean that I could add more terminals by adding a line
starting cN, and with ttyN? (where N is between 7 and 12 - the number of
function keys on a keyboard)?
And, if I did, and <ctrl><alt><Fx>'d out of x-windows, and had 12
consoles, how would I get back in - there's no F13?

> So, what was that you saw on tty1 (F1)? Well, Linux also allocates a
> special device called the "console" (/dev/console) and places it on tty1
> unless otherwise instructed. When you [<ctl>]<alt><F1>, you ended up
> looking at /dev/console. /dev/console is special; that's where the
> startup messages are sent, so that's what you saw when you got there.

I figured something like that, but thanks for putting me right as opposed
to my usual 'well, i think it should do this, so i'll do that... *splat*'
method ;-)

> Assuming that none of the other consoles were started, you got only
> blank screens when you [<ctl>]<alt><Fx>'ed to them.

I got the login prompt on each of mine - I'd already used 1 to log in, and
2 to do something as root before logging out of that and starting
x-windows as a normal user in 1.

>
> And, that's that ;-)

Thanks

sb