There are a few things that can go wrong on all supported operating systems. This section is meant to give a few hints how to find them.
mgetty is correctly set up in /etc/inittab, but ps
doesn’t list mgetty anyway.
This is usually caused by not notifying the init of your changes to
/etc/inittab (or /etc/ttytab on BSD). You have to signal
init with a HUP signal (kill -1 1) that it should re-read this
file.
mgetty is setup correctly, runs a while, then stops being listed by
ps, and init complains something like ‘respawning to
fast, disabling …’.
This means, there is an error in the mgetty set up. If the mgetty
process quits too fast (because of an error), and too often in a row,
init will assume that something is going crazy, and disable the
process. You can re-enable it with kill -1 1, but you should check
the mgetty log file (!!!!!) before, to find out why it failed in
the first place