/dev/syscon

[Richard Foulk]

} A friend's 3B1 often boots up such that when he logs in he is on
} /dev/syscon rather than on /dev/w1.  Similarly, windy won't work.  It
} looks like the Window Manager is having problems, but the question is
} why.  I checked his /etc/rc and /etc/inittab and they are both
} identical to mine.  All the standard processes are listed with a ps,
} but the wmgr appears to use a suspicously low amount of CPU.  Any ideas?

I've forgotten the details now, but SysV used to have a bug whereby
it would misbehave if the syscon entry in the /dev directory occurred
before the console entry.

Do something like "od -c /dev" on both machines and compare the relative
positions of console and syscon.

To move the console to the beginning of the directory do something
like this:

	ln firstentry temp
	rm firstentry			# free up the first slot
	mv temp firstentry
	ln console console_temp		# grab the first slot
	rm console
	mv console_temp console

firstentry is whatever you find at the top of the list when you
do the "od -c /dev".

This is all just a guess, but earlier releases of SysV did really
funky things with syscon and console.

Richard