Console Trouble?

Question

Greetings. I recently updated my OS from 10.3.9 to 10.4.7 and have run into an interesting snag. I'm a *nix jock so in addition to the Aqua environment, I also make frequent use of the Bash shell and X11. When I used 10.3.9 I occasionally logged directly into the shell by typing ">console" into the Login window's name field. When I first tried this on 10.4, the window disappeared and I got a Unix-style Login prompt as usual. However, while I was typing my password, the prompt disappeared and was replaced by a blank blue screen. No text, no spinning beachball of death, no nothing. I've let the computer sit like this for quite a while (about an hour) with no change. While I don't absolutely NEED the console access, I would prefer to have it as an available option. BTW for those that are too lazy to look at the information bar below, I have an iMac G5 ALS 1.8gHz.

Answer 1

Hi LordJeremy,
As far as I know the ability to login as ">console" was never supposed to be a fully supported feature of the OS even though it was fairly widely known.
I actually began seeing the behavior you've described when I upgraded from 10.2.x to 10.3. I saw it on some machines and not on others... but on most it no longer worked. And on some machines it would sometimes work and sometimes not. But it's never worked reliably for me since 10.3 came out.
One solution I ran across indicated it would only work for the very first login following a reboot... but once you had logged in as a GUI user attempting to logout and login as >console would no longer work until you had rebooted your machine. There seemed to be some truth to that although it didn't seem to be 100% correct. Somewhere else I read that the problem was related to changes made in 10.3 to support fast user switching.
I have never run across a reliable solution to this and so I rarely attempt to do it any more.
Steve