Thanks for this info. This was education for me since I know very little about device files and pseudo filesystems.
The error seems to be elsewhere, since after changing the fstab I get the message "mount: devpts already mounted at /dev/pts". My /etc/init.d/devpts.sh is in place and obviously has done its job during booting. I did a bit of study of my /dev directory and discovered that pts is a directory within it. To my surprise it showed a size of zero. Kind of wondering what others have in their debian boxes. drwxr-xr-x root root 0 Jan 21 13:08:32 2001 pts I also have Slackware-7 installed on a different partition on the same box. Though the ownerships and permissions of /dev/pts directory were identical. This, however, showed a size of 4096. drwxr-xr-x root root 4096 Apr 21 11:10:27 1999 pts Could this be the genesis of the problem ? If yes, how does one go about sorting the problem out ? USM Bish On Sat, 20 Jan 2001 19:20:40 +0100 "J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 20:38:57 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > The error message I receive is "xterm: no available ptys". > > > c) I cannot run the "script" program as user. As root there are no > > problems. The error message I get is "openpty failed". This happens > > in "X" as well as in console mode. > Oh yes, I forgot to mention, that even mc and mcedit complains: "subshell.c: couldn't open master side of pty pty_open_master: Bad file descript" > I suspect you don't have the "devpts" pseudo-filesystem mounted. Try adding > something like > devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 > to /etc/fstab. > > On Debian, libc6's /etc/init.d/devpts.sh takes care of mounting the devpts > pseudo-filesystem. > > HTH, > Ray
