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haziz
Asked: 2019-03-10 13:25:20 +0800 CST

How do I increase the number of TTY consoles?

  • 772

I often find it convenient to work entirely from the command line, and like to have several tty "consoles" open simultaneously.

How do I make my system default to having more than the traditional 6 tty consoles (CTRL-ALT-Fn)?

Also with the transition to SystemD and Gnome, has the tty console number actually drop? I seem to struggle sometimes opening even one, let alone several, and often end up with a behavior in which several (CTRL-ALT-Fn) combinations all lead to a GUI rather than a tty.

I am running a combo of Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10 across several machines, if it matters.

command-line tty virtual-console console

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Before answering your question, I would rather point you to use something like screen or tmux.

    But if you insist on using ttys, you can spawn a new one with:

    sudo systemctl start [email protected]

    with N being a number not already in use.

    You could change the default number of ttys started at boot (6) to something else by editing /etc/systemd/logind.conf and uncommenting the first line and change the number 6 to something else like:

    [Login]
NAutoVTs=7

    Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Getty

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  2. You cannot (short of recompiling the kernel).

    Your terminology is incorrect. You are asking for TTY login sessions.

    You have 63 Kernel Virtual Terminal (KVT) devices available. Always. To change this would involve recompiling the kernel, and possibly dealing with knock-on effects caused by assumptions in the rest of the operating system about the major and minor device numbers. But I suspect that this is far more than enough for you.

    What you actually asking for is to change is the number of TTY login session services that are started on your system. Not all of those 63 terminal devices have a TTY login session service started against them. You want more login sessions.

    Yes, the behaviour has changed with systemd. TTY login services are now ordinary services, like any other — an innovation from AT&T System 5 Release 4 back in 1988 that the Ubuntu world first gained with Upstart.

    Nowadays on Ubuntu systemd-logind starts TTY login sessions on demand, as each kernel virtual terminal is activated by the key chords that switch amongst KVTs. There are controls in its configuration file that place an upper limit on the KVT number for which it will do this, and that can force a particular numbered KVT to always have a TTY login session started.

    But of course you can manually start and enable the autovt@name services.

    That several KVTs show a GUI is not really anything to do with systemd, in contrast, and everything to do with the fact that that is how multiple users are logged on with GUIs. Each GUI session has a KVT, so that it can coöperate with the KVT switching and HID sharing. If you have more than one logged in GUI session (at least one being devoted to the GUI login subsystem itself) then more than one of the KVTs is claimed.

    (I had a user of my softwares who likewise found the TUI WWW browsers not up to the job, in this particular case of reading DocBook doco, as the GUI WWW browsers can. So I wrote a tool. ☺)

    Further reading

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  3. Your question has two parts. In answer to your second part:

    Your concern that Ubuntu has fewer ttys is due to the fact that the GUIs where moved to tty1 (ctrl + alt + F1) and tty2 (ctrl + alt + F2) instead of F7 and F8, there are still the same amount of ttys by default.

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