Enabling a terminal for user logins using inittab

6.10 LPAR mode z/VM guest KVM guest

If your distribution uses inittab, you can use an inittab entry to allow user logins on a terminal.

To enable user logins with the mingetty program, add a line of this form to the /etc/inittab file:

<id>:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear <dev>

where:

<id>: is a unique identifier for the entry in the inittab file.
<dev>: specifies the device node of the terminal, omitting the leading /dev/. For example, instead of specifying /dev/sclp_line0, specify sclp_line0.

With mingetty, you must explicitly export the TERM environment variable with the terminal name. The terminal name indicates the capabilities of the terminal device. Examples for terminal names are linux, dumb, xterm, or vt220.

mingetty example:

# export TERM=linux

Instead of mingetty, you can use agetty, which can set the TERM environment variable at startup.

To set the TERM environment variable to linux and enable user logins with the agetty program add a line of this form to the /etc/inittab file:

<id>:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 9600 <dev> linux

where <id> and <dev> have the same meanings as in the mingetty example.

The /etc/inittab file might already have an entry for a terminal. Be sure not to provide multiple entries for the same device or ID. If an existing entry uses a name that you cannot map to the udev-created nodes or nodes you created yourself, you can comment it out and replace it.

For more information, see the man page for the inittab file.

Example

To enable a device ttyS0 for user logins with mingetty specify, for example:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear ttyS0