[CLUE-Tech] "PTY problems" or "I'm an Idiot"

[David Anselmi]

Chris Terry wrote:
> I've been beating myself up over this, but I can't figure it out.  I 
> just switched to gentoo (tasty, aside from this problem), and my system 
> now refuses to allocate PTYs to anything.  I've poked at the kernel, 
> recompiled a few times, jabbed at various conf files, and searched 
> through the docs.  I'm able to use terminals the ALT-F[1-5] way, but I 
> can't use any xterms or remote terms.  I don't know what else is 
> pertinent here, but I've compiled devfs support (gentoo requires it) and 
> Unix98 PTY support, and I've tried turning on and off the /dev/pts 
> filesystem support in the kernel.  Any ideas?

Linux virtual consoles (ALT-F[1-x]) use /dev/ttyx, not a pseudo 
terminal.  So that is irrelevant to your problem.

It might help to have the exact error message.  Here are some guesses:

If any of your PTY stuff is compiled as a module, is the module getting 
loaded?

Do you have /dev/pts, /dev/ptmx, or /dev/pty?? created?  Do you have 
/dev/pts mounted as a devpts filesystem (Debian has a boot script for this)?

Perhaps this helps:

http://www.patoche.org/LTT/kernel/00000172.html

Dave