Running Linux in Low Memory

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003 06:48:29 -0600 (CST) Duane Attaway
<dattaway at dattaway.org> writes:
> On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Leo J Mauler wrote:
> 
> > While this is covered in the "Small-Memory HOWTO", I 
> > thought I'd mention it anyway.
> > 
> > You remove Virtual Consoles by bringing up /etc/inittab 
> > in a text editor.
> > 
> > Look for a line like:
> > 
> > c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty tty1 38400
> 
> This gave me an idea to shrink things even further.  How about 
> starting GNU's screen utility to launch terminals from init.  It 
> would bypass the authentication process altogether for a real 
> minimalistic system, aka DOS.
> 
> Something like:
> 
> c1:12345:respawn:/usr/bin/screen
> 
> But it looks like someone beat me to it (google newsgroup link :)
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/w6vw
> 
> Bastards!

You may have heard that I finally got FVWM2 running over XWindows using
the generic VESA driver for XFree86 v4.3.0.

Well, it works great...until you exit X.  Then the screen goes blank and
nothing happens.  Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't do anything so I *think* X
has stopped, but not certain.  Ctrl-Alt-F7 does nothing either (thats the
key combination to shell out of X and switch to a different console term,
right?).  Ctrl-Alt-Del does a graceful reboot, and the console comes back
up after rebooting, so at least there's a kludgy way out of it.

I did read something in XFree86 4.3.0 documentation that gave me pause
about the removal of the excess VCs.  It says that runlevel 4 was for an
X-only system, but doing so without a VC active put the system in load
state 1 (still haven't learned what that means, but it doesn't sound
good).  So what runlevel 4 does now in XFree86 4.3.0 is it opens a VC in
tty6, which is one of the VCs I disabled in /etc/inittab.

Could the disabling of that VC6 be causing a problem with XFree86 4.3.0? 
I'm going to try it out later on tonight, but thought I'd get some input
from others before trying it.

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