[Konsole-devel] [Bug 87481] Konsole freezes on startup when unable to allocate PTY

[Adam]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87481         




------- Additional Comments From g4c9z unb ca  2005-04-08 23:44 -------
Sorry for the delay.  That error message seems much better - though frankly, I was never completely sure what was causing it to be unable to allocate a pty (which means you probably know better than me what the error message should be).  So you believe it's the read/write permissions on the devices in /dev/pts?

I see now that what's happening on my system is that when Konsole opens, a new device is created in /dev/pts, with permissions being denied to everyone except the owner of the new Konsole process.  So when I had RC_DEVICE_TARBALL set to "yes", there were already the maximum number of ptys created, and perhaps also only root had permission to use any of them.  It seems to me that this is a fundamental limitation at a lower level; i.e. there should really be no limit on how many ptys the system can create.  If that's the case, it's true that I don't think Konsole can do much better than to give an error message that mentions ptys and is incomprensible to some users; though in the long run I'd say someone should fix that limitation.

Some things you might want to add to the error message, though - a notification that "Konsole could not be started because...", as well as "This is probably due to incorrect configuration of the pty devices".