fgetty is a fast and extremely small replacement for getty.

http://www.fefe.de/fgetty/

If you are running debian, just do `apt-get install fgetty` and then manually replace every occurance of the following substring in /etc/inittab

from: respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty
to: respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty

WARNING: Don't mess up inittab or you'll make your system unbootable. Don't edit inittab if you are new to Linux.

A quick reminder that's always helpful for this sort of thing - if you do screw up and make your system unbootable (and if you're confident in Linux), see if you can free up 80MB or so from the Disk Images section, and use the Distribution Wizard to deploy a small Debian distribution (being the smallest distro available right now).

Then, edit the Debian profile and make sure the disk image containing the root of the other distro is somewhere in the profile. Boot it up, and use the tools available to you to mount the image and edit the inittab. Then shut down and reboot into your old profile.

This advice is elsewhere in the forums but it always bears repeating.

apt cant find package fgetty

apt-get install fgetty
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package fgetty

what does your /etc/apt/sources.list look like ?

apt-cache search getty: returned nothing usefull

Im using debian 3.0r1 small.

If you use my sources.list with woody, it'll mess things up because I upgraded from woody to sarge. I also use apt pinning to use unstable for apps not found in sarge.

Seems packages.debian.org is down for this weekend.

Normally, you'd be able to see this package at:

http://packages.debian.org/fgetty

Also, the memory savings from fgetty are much better on machines running multiple instances. I think linode's have their inittab configured to only run one getty instance.

I use fgetty not only for memory savings but was told by someone in data security that it is more secure than getty.

You can always just traverse down ftp.debian.org manually:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fgetty/fgetty_0.6-2_i386.deb

I wonder what's going on with packages.debian.org... That's a heck of an outage!

Oh, it seems to have come back up. With this not-so-helpful-anymore notice:

Looks like it's only in testing/unstable, might be able to find a backport