goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) (03/03/90)
A few weeks ago (I can't locate the article) I believe someone asked about things like inittab, alternate getty commands, and the like. I responded, saying that the Xenix inittab file is really only a re-wording of the /etc/ttys file, and it cannot do things like let you spawn different getty commands to differ- ent lines. I suggested hacking agetty to read its parameters from a file. This was silly. A much better solution is to create a new getty command that reads a secondary inittab file (on my system I've named it "myinittab"), and then overlays itself with whatever getty command that file specifies. I'm not a C programmer by choice (normally I use Icon), but any dope can write something like this, given the ability to read manuals. What I do is over- lay my new getty command with getty.old for console ttys, but use agetty for other lines. I have a 2-user system (and use it as such), so this method has the secondary benefit of letting me use mscreen (which is otherwise impossible). I'm just posting this in case anyone wants further details about the setup, or else a copy of my code (only about 150 lines). It's an easy thing to do, and for people used to having more flexibility than the regular Xenix inittab format offers it is worth the few minutes of fooling around. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer