Adjusting tty’s in Fedora 13 with upstart

Fedora 13 has quite a few changes related to upstart, and one of the biggest ones is how terminals are configured.  Most distributions tuck the tty configuration away in /etc/inittab, /etc/event.d/ or /etc/init/.  If you want to adjust the number of tty’s in Fedora 13, you’ll need to look in /etc/sysconfig/init:

 new RH6.0 bootup
# verbose => old-style bootup
# anything else => new style bootup without ANSI colors or positioning
BOOTUP=color
# column to start "[  OK  ]" label in
RES_COL=60
# terminal sequence to move to that column. You could change this
# to something like "tput hpa ${RES_COL}" if your terminal supports it
MOVE_TO_COL="echo -en \\033[${RES_COL}G"
# terminal sequence to set color to a 'success' color (currently: green)
SETCOLOR_SUCCESS="echo -en \\033[0;32m"
# terminal sequence to set color to a 'failure' color (currently: red)
SETCOLOR_FAILURE="echo -en \\033[0;31m"
# terminal sequence to set color to a 'warning' color (currently: yellow)
SETCOLOR_WARNING="echo -en \\033[0;33m"
# terminal sequence to reset to the default color.
SETCOLOR_NORMAL="echo -en \\033[0;39m"
# default kernel loglevel on boot (syslog will reset this)
LOGLEVEL=3
# Set to anything other than 'no' to allow hotkey interactive startup...
PROMPT=yes
# Set to 'yes' to allow probing for devices with swap signatures
AUTOSWAP=no
# What ttys should gettys be started on?
ACTIVE_CONSOLES=/dev/tty[1-6]

The very last line controls the number of tty’s that are kept alive on your system. If you need more tty’s, simply increase the 6 to a higher number. If you only want one terminal (which is usually what I want in Xen), just make this adjustment:

# What ttys should gettys be started on?
ACTIVE_CONSOLES=/dev/tty1

A normal telinit q doesn’t seem to adjust the terminals on the fly as it did before upstart was involved. I’m not sure if this is a bug or an intended feature. Either way, a reboot solves the problem and you should see the changes afterwards.