Re: screen's console

[Phil!Gregory]

* Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> [2004-07-20 09:07 +1000]:
> Is it possible to have screen start similarly on a Linux console
> "terminal", without first having to log in?

Not without some hackery.

The most important thing about the login process is telling the system who
you are.  (Generally, you have to prove your identity with a password,
too.)  When you start things from xterms, you've already identified
yourself before you started X (either you logged in via XDM or you logged
into the console and started X from there).  When you're on a fresh
console, the system doesn't know who you are, so it doesn't know who to
run programs as.

As I indicated, you could hack around this by writing a script that 'su'ed
to the appropriate user and ran screen, and then running the script from
init.  I don't think the benefits would be all that great compared to the
work to implement it.

Note that "login shells" are slightly different.  A login shell doesn't do
any of the identification or authentication that the system requires; by
the time you get to a shell, all of that's been done already.  It just
happens that it's often convenient to only do some things immediately
after you log in to a system, and not if you start a shell after that
(say, by calling an xterm).  The original meaning of a login shell was
just a way to tell the shell "Hey, I've just logged in; do some extra
stuff for me."

-- 
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