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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

In ye-olden-UNIX-days it was possible to open an xterm in 'console mode' where system type messages would get reported. How do you do this in linux and how come that feature is no longer desired?

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See http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=xconsole

But I have no idea whether this still exists and works on Linux. It is still started by XDM on OpenBSD though.

http://linux.die.net/man/4/tty_ioctl suggests that TIOCCONS, which xconsole uses, has been supported as recently as 2.6.x, when it started requiring privilege (before, it allowed anyone to call it). Maybe that change made xconsole stop working for many users.

OS X also includes a Console app (it's in the Utilities folder in Applications).

https://gist.github.com/agumonkey/9730112

/etc/systemd/journald.conf:

    ForwardToConsole=yes
    TTYPath=/dev/tty12
    MaxLevelConsole=info

Sure, you can also do that with most any logger (like, suchas syslog-ng), but how does that address the OP's question? It looks like you're writing to tty12, not to the OP's xterm. :)

You're right I totally misread his question.

With systemd you simply do:

  journalctl -f

where the f stands for follow.

If you try to work on a console in such a mode, it's really spammy and interferes with ... everything. I bet you could get something similar with /dev/console and minicom, or something similar.

xrootconsole or multitail are useful for this sort of thing.

rsyslog can be configured to send certain kinds of messages to all logged-in users, usually emergencies. These end up in all currently open terminals for me, i.e. each and every tab of every xfce4-terminal I have open at the time.

I’d guess it’s mostly a configuration issue and people care less about these things nowadays?

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