DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: dsl nogui
After a little more exploration, it has come to my attention that the runlevels in DSL are not utilized to their full potential. I have no experience with Debian systems outside of DSL, so maybe this is standard....but it seems like the runlevels could be more useful.
runlevels 0 and 6 make complete sense, as they are shutdown and reboot.
runlevel 5 (default) allows for the most flexible system as far as having a grapical/mouse system is concerned, but it provides only one tty, which seems to be frozen with root ownership (my screen extension has been a pain as a result).
runlevel 2 makes sense as a single-user root system.
runlevels 3 and 4 are identical, with one service more than is run in 2. The additional ttys, however, are automatically logged in as root. I suppose this is because they are created using bash instead of a getty application...I'm not too clear about how that works.
I think it would be very useful to change either 3 or 4 in a way that provides an additional tty for dsl instead of root....or maybe add tty2 to runlevel 5. Can bash be launched for dsl instead of root? I tried a few things to get tty2 into runlevel 5 but it either didn't work or it automatically logged in as root.
If you are at a tty as root, and then 'su dsl', is that the same as logging into any other shell as dsl? Does it present any more of a security risk than dsl's tty1 in runlevel 5?
Conclusion: There doesn't seem to be much of a text-only system available without the initial root power...that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Going into runlevel 5 and then shutting down X works, but a console system really should have multiple terminals available.
original here.