Arch Linux

sfabius

Member

Registered: 2007-07-07

Posts: 153

Could not open PTY [sort of solved]

I restarted KDE and found that I could not open a terminal program. For Konsole I got the error "Konsole could not open PTY...." I fixed by mounting /dev/pts: after opening the graphical 'Run program' in KDE (Alt-F2), I typed in:

sudo mount /dev/pts

So now I can use my konsole, xterm, eterm, etc. 
My question is: Why did this happen? I did not reboot -- I shut down and restarted X/KDE? And more importantly, how do I avoid it in the future?

jamtat

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 224

Re: Could not open PTY [sort of solved]

A very similar problem has just cropped up for me after having done a pacman -Syu. This is a fairly new Arch install (ca. 2 months). I'm using gnome, btw. After having done the recent system update, when I try to open an xterm from another terminal (3 xterms open already), I get the error message

xterm: Error 32, errno 2: No such file or directory
Reason: get_pty: not enough ptys

Prior to having done pacman -Syu, I had never had that error message when trying to open a new xterm--despite having perhaps as many as 10 xterms open. As with the poster who started this thread, running

sudo mount /dev/pts

resolves the problem. After having done that, I can open additonal xterms as expected.

What's up with this problem? Any ideas?

Thanks,
James

jamtat

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 224

Re: Could not open PTY [sort of solved]

After a reboot of the system I've come to the conslusion that this problem was not caused by my recent upgrade. Instead, it was likely caused by some fiddling I did with udevd, includinhg stopping and restarting udevd a couple of times (was trying to get my Nomad Jukebox mp3 player working for my user under Arch--but that's a story for another thread). So, though running mount /dev/pts solved the short-lived problem I was having with xterms not opening, it looks like the problem was caused by my fiddling with udevd: it apparently does not crop up when I've not done any stopping or restarting of udevd (just opened about 7 xterms with no problems after having rebooted to check this).

James

vsk

Member

Registered: 2008-05-27

Posts: 70

Re: Could not open PTY [sort of solved]

Mmhmm.
In the very first kernel I compiled, I forgot to include pseudo teletype support for pty and konsole, xterm, etc. all complained that pts wasn't mounted and spouted various exotice error messages.
Udev shouldn't have the issue, but I'm not one to know..