How to use less memory by replacing getty with fgetty

A quick reminder that's always helpful for this sort of thing - if you do screw up and make your system unbootable (and if you're confident in Linux), see if you can free up 80MB or so from the Disk Images section, and use the Distribution Wizard to deploy a small Debian distribution (being the smallest distro available right now).

Then, edit the Debian profile and make sure the disk image containing the root of the other distro is somewhere in the profile. Boot it up, and use the tools available to you to mount the image and edit the inittab. Then shut down and reboot into your old profile.

This advice is elsewhere in the forums but it always bears repeating.

apt cant find package fgetty

apt-get install fgetty

Reading Package Lists… Done

Building Dependency Tree… Done

E: Couldn't find package fgetty

what does your /etc/apt/sources.list look like ?

apt-cache search getty: returned nothing usefull

Im using debian 3.0r1 small.

If you use my sources.list with woody, it'll mess things up because I upgraded from woody to sarge. I also use apt pinning to use unstable for apps not found in sarge.

Seems packages.debian.org is down for this weekend.

Normally, you'd be able to see this package at:

http://packages.debian.org/fgetty

Also, the memory savings from fgetty are much better on machines running multiple instances. I think linode's have their inittab configured to only run one getty instance.

I use fgetty not only for memory savings but was told by someone in data security that it is more secure than getty.

You can always just traverse down ftp.debian.org manually:

~~[http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fgetty/fgetty0.6-2i386.deb" target="blank">](http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/ … 2_i386.deb">http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fgetty/fgetty0.6-2_i386.deb](

I wonder what's going on with packages.debian.org… That's a heck of an outage!

Oh, it seems to have come back up. With this not-so-helpful-anymore notice:

> Scheduled downtime: Due to a scheduled power shutdown at the site where this server is hosted, packages.debian.org will not be available from Saturday, January 29th 00:00 UTC until Monday, January 31th, 07:00 UTC.

@rndinit9:

apt cant find package fgetty

apt-get install fgetty

Reading Package Lists… Done

Building Dependency Tree… Done

E: Couldn't find package fgetty

what does your /etc/apt/sources.list look like ?

apt-cache search getty: returned nothing usefull

Im using debian 3.0r1 small.

Looks like it's only in testing/unstable, might be able to find a backport