chris z Posted July 7, 2003 Report Share Posted July 7, 2003 .......& what does it do? is it needed? still learning here. i read the manpage about it, but i'm still lost. when i go to terminal & run "ps a", i get this PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 1786 vc/1 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty1 1787 vc/2 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2 1788 vc/3 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty3 1789 vc/4 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty4 1790 vc/5 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty5 1791 vc/6 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty6 3361 pts/2 S 0:00 bash 3391 pts/2 R 0:00 ps a why are 6 of these processes running? do they take up memory? decrease performance? as always, i searched the forum & Googled without any satisfactory answers before i posted. TIA, Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted July 7, 2003 Report Share Posted July 7, 2003 I believe it's being used to connect your virtual consoles to an actual terminal on your system. i think this is normal activity, and you should not be worried-it is needed. i would double check, but not at a linux systam ATM. to give a little more info, mingetty is a minimal implimintation of getty specifically for virtual consoles. your virtual consoles can be accessed by pressing ctrl-alt-Fx (where x is the # of the virtual console). virtual consoles 1-6 are command line, while virtual consoles 7-12 (i think it goes to 12?) are graphical interfaces for use with X-Windows/XFree86. mingetty doesn't need to run on 7-12 since they aren't going to be running a shell/command line. however, it needs to be running to loop your virtual consoles to an actual terminal, as terminals are identified by devfs as /dev/ttyx (where x is, get this, the # of the terminal). atleast, that's my understanding ;-) I'm sure aru will pop in and correct me :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.