According to Montana Quiring:

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback at the last MUUG meeting about the problem I had with Control+C droping someone to a shell prompt in the forst TTY.

I had a google group thread here if you want to read/respond there: http://groups.google.ca/group/ubuntu_lite/browse_thread/thread/11b044eeebe0a...

If you read this thread to the end, you'll see that the X server is launched from within root's ~/.bash_profile, which would explain why you see this problem...

I changed the line in /etc/inittab from: 1:2345:respawn:/bin/bash -login > /dev/tty1 2>&1 < /dev/tty1 to: 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1

and that solves to problem of getting to a shell but now X Windows doesn't start.

I don't fully understand what the orig line is doing and I think that's my problem.

As Bill mentioned, the redirect stuff is what you see at the end of the line. however, the /bin/bash -login is the key part here. The -login option forces bash to treat this as a login shell, and read the .bash_profile for the logged-in user (root in this case, since init runs as root, and nothing has been done to change to a different userid).

This strikes me as a roundabout way of doing things, and also (as you've discovered) not very bullet-proof. I'd recommend you change the .bash_profile to not start the X server from there, but rather start it in its own line in /etc/inittab, such as this...

x:5:respawn:/usr/X11R6/bin/startx

Decide which runlevel(s) is/are appropriate for this system, of course. Also, you may want to just use the command line you've commented out of the .bash_profile, if it's different than the startx above, but you will need to specify the full path name of the command explicitly, I believe.

Also note that commands started in inittab aren't automatically bound to a tty (such as a virtual console), so you might need to explicitly do so using redirects (as they did for the bash -login). That's not necessary when you invoke getty, since you specify a tty as a command line argument to it, and it's job is to set up a process group bound to the tty. This likely won't matter in the case of X, but if you want to debug or check output from the X server or clients, then you should redirect it somewhere (a log file if not a virtual console).