[SOLVED] Konsole is broken

[jiml8]

Yesterday the system notified me of an update, which included a new glibc. So I installed it.

Now, when I open Konsole, it does not respond to the keyboard though it does respond to the mouse. I installed xterm; it won't open. I installed eterm; it opens but promptly gives an exit message that says: "press any key to exit" and, when I press the key...it exits.

Without a terminal, this system is useless. I'll have to roll back unless there is a solution to this that can be quickly implemented.

[doktor5000]

Hmmm, dumb question, did you reboot since the update?

I can only say that konsole and other terminals work just fine. Can you get a tty?

[jiml8]

Yes, I have rebooted. Both to pick up the new glibc and subsequently as I was wondering if something had gone wrong that a reboot would correct. I do have TTYs available and that is how I have been debugging this. No other console available.

I found an error message in .xsession-errors: konsole(13394)/kdecore (KPty/K3Process) KPty::open: can't open a pseudo teletype

There is also a stray line in the .xsession-errors below this error message. It is not identified by process or anything else, and looks almost like a line wrap (which it can't be) but it says: "the device must begin with /dev/".

Googling on this leads to a suggestion that this error means the pts device is not properly mounted, but I have /dev/pts and /dev/pts/ptmx in place. There is what looks like an appropriate entry in fstab and that entry has been there at least since I converted to Mageia. checking the mount indicates that devpts is mounted on /dev/pts. So I don't see a problem except that it isn't working.

[doktor5000]

Have a look at https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail ... 25332.html or
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1312586
There shouldn't be any fstab entry for that, best comment it out.

And compare outputs of

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mount | grep devpts

This is what it looks like here on fresh Mageia 3 install:

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[doktor5000@Mageia3 ~]$ mount | grep devpts
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)

FWIW, just quickly googled for "KPty::open: can't open a pseudo teletype" and found tons of similar problems all originating in custom entries for devpts in /etc/fstab.

[jiml8]

Removing the entry from fstab seems to have fixed it. Thanks.

I wonder why I didn't find those links when I googled from here...

As I look back, I find that devpts entry in the fstab that I was last using in Mandriva 2010. I am pretty sure that after I installed Mageia 2, I just rolled that fstab back in, in order to pick up my configuration (along with inittab and a number of others). So that would account for the presence of that entry; it was placed there long ago by either Mandrake or Mandriva.

When I moved it into Mageia 2, it caused no trouble so was not investigated. Only with this latest upgrade is there a problem.

Oh well. No problem anymore. Thanks.