Acer Linpus textconsole mini-HOWTO

XWindows is nice, but having textconsoles is sometimes nice and a faster way to work... By default the Aspireone with the Acer Linpus distro is locked into XWindows.
This is how I "opened" it. This will give you four text terminals, XWindows and one terminal with a graphical background.

1. Take a backup of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. open it as root in your favourite editor and comment out the with the DontVTSwitch-option or change it's value to "no"
3. Take a backup of /etc/inittab
4. open it as root in your favourite editor and uncomment gettys for tty3-6 (we want more than one VC, right?). They are the lines close to the end which look like "#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3". Leave the line for tty2 commented! I ended up in XWindoes without a working keyboard when I tried to run a getty on tty2. Traditionally XWindows is run on tty7, but Acer runs XWindows on tty2...
5. Restart XWindows (= reboot, as zapping XWindows is not possible and killing the server also makes the machine reboot...)
6. You should now be able to do a Ctrl-Alt-F3 and be presented with a nice text login!

For the non-american world you also have to load the correct keyboard layout. Using /etc/sysconfig/keyboard would be nice, but it turns out /etc/rc.sysinit is never executed at startup. I chose to add the line loadkeys -d to /etc/rc.local. And then I replaced /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/defkeymap.map.gz with a softlink to my keyboard layout (fi-latin1.map.gz). You could also do loadkeys <name of keymap> in rc.local, but my keyboard layout is unlikely to change...

Thoughts and questions:
- This guide does not explain howto use an editor to edit the files. Just as a little precaution to somebody too easily messing up their system. If you don't know how to edit them with root privileges you don't need text consoles.
- It is a bit annoying there are bits and pieces in /etc lying around never being used...
- Would it be a good idea to allow zapping of XWindows (xorg.conf). Let's say the touchpad goes bonkers or the system gets unresponsive? It would be better than hitting the powerswitch...
- I can't seem to get the euro symbol in the text console. fi-latin1 (and fi-latin9, which should have it) just give me a strange symbol. fi-latin9 gives me a cent symbol on AltGr-shift-c, but it is uggly.
- Sorry for possible grammar and spelling misstakes. English is not my native language.
- who removes /var/lock/subsys/local (touched from rc.local)?

Edit: corrected a typo and added a comment that XWindows is still started.

 

Well! Does the boot time drop significantly?

 

No. I actually had not thought of not starting X. What I described in my post starts text consoles "parallell" to XWindows.
XWindows runs on tty2, tty1 is a shell with a graphical background and tty3-6 are "pure" text terminals.

I now also realize there is a Howto-section in this forum. I don't mind if an administrator moves this topic. If it considered enough of an HowTo...