Using fgetty instead of getty on Debian

Getty is known to be memory-hungry. Let's replace it with something lighter, which works in most cases: fgetty On Debian Sarge and up, it is already packaged

What is fgetty?

very small, efficient, console-only getty and login
fgetty is a small, efficient, console-only getty for Linux. It is derived from mingetty but hacked until it would link against diet libc to produce the smallest memory footprint possible for a simple yet complete getty.

fgetty includes a login program that supports the checkpassword authentication interface, and also a checkpassword program that uses the standard C library interface to passwd and shadow.

Install fgetty in debian

#apt-get install fgetty

But this is not sufficent for it to be installed instead of getty.You will have to edit /etc/inittab. Warning: this is a very dangerous file to edit, as it may render your system unbootable. You have been warned!

The following lines call getty

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2

Lets replace it with fgetty, which takes less arguments:
1:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty2

And do that for as many virtual consoles you would like to have. If you don't need many, comment the lines, but I advise you to keep at least 2.

Save the file and exit.

And then, restart init

# killall -HUP init