I have lines like: tty1::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 etc. for every tty[1-4] in /etc/inittab. I noticed getty does not get respawned when /dev/console is a symlink to /dev/tty5. I wanted console messages to go to a free tty. When I remove the symlink, the behaviour is fine. Regards, Joop