Consoles and tty12

Obarun's console setup has one peculiarity worth knowing before you need it.

tty12 is always started

The boot module unconditionally enables tty-earlier@tty12. It is started early, before the rest of the boot sequence, precisely so that it survives a boot that goes wrong later: a filesystem that fails to mount, a service that hangs, a misconfigured display manager.

Reach it with Ctrl+Alt+F12.

Root cannot log in on tty12

This is deliberate. /etc/securetty lists the terminals root may use, and tty12 is not among them:

$ cat /etc/securetty
console
tty1
tty2
tty3
tty4
tty5
tty6
ttyS0
hvc0

The reasoning is that a machine reachable only over the network is safer if the emergency console demands a username as well as a password. On a remote server, guessing both is much harder than guessing one.

Create an unprivileged user

If you install a system with no user account other than root, and something later breaks the boot, tty12 will come up and let nobody in. You will need external media to recover the machine.

Create a normal user, give it a password, and remember it.

How many consoles

The number of regular consoles is a boot module setting:

## Set the number of tty(s) to start.
## 0 means no tty. Maximum is 11.

TTY=!2

TTY=2 starts tty-rc@tty1 and tty-rc@tty2. TTY=0 starts none. The maximum is 11, because tty12 is reserved for the emergency console.

Change it with:

# 66 configure -r TTY=4 boot@system
# 66 reconfigure boot@system

The change takes effect at the next boot. See The boot module for the rest of the settings.

Keymap and font

The same module owns the console keymap and font:

KEYMAP=!us
FONT=!lat9w-16

SETUPCONSOLE=no disables console setup entirely, which also makes KEYMAP, FONT, FONT_MAP and FONT_UNIMAP inert.