Problems with console-mode on MacOSX

kenny

Registered
I recently got a MacMini which I immediately put into service as a Web Server. Of course, they ship with only 256MB, so turning off the GUI was interesting to me in order to leave as much memory for Apache as possible. I pretty quickly came across the "nvram boot-args=-v" to avoid the GUI boot. I had originally used an auto-login of ">console" to drop the loginwindow, which was quite useful, and eventually came upon editing /etc/ttys to avoid loginwindow altogether (which saves even more memory). I've been keeping notes on this on my Wiki at http://altacrest.dyndns.org/wiki/bin/view/Main/NoGUIonMacOSX (which is served up by my MacMini, BTW).

What I've run into in the last few days is that the /etc/ttys method (of avoiding LoginWindow) leaves a freshly-installed machine unusable (can't log in). See my notes for more details. On a machine that's been installed for a while (I did this on my old Wallstreet PowerBook without incident), using the /etc/ttys method (described in my notes on the Wiki) is fine. On a cleanly installed machine (using a G4/500 for my testing), editing /etc/ttys to change the console makes logging in impossible.

So, any clues as to what's going on with a freshly-installed machine? I messed around with an older iMac yesterday to try to figure it out, but nothing I did seemed to help. Then, just to add to the fun, it started working after a few hours. In my notes, I mention "niutil -resync ." as a possible solution, but it didn't repro on my G4.

Yeah, I know it's a lot of text to read through, but I'm really puzzled by this...

Thanks
 
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