[plug] terminal emulators fail to start

[Rennie]

Rennie wrote:
> Cameron Patrick wrote:
>> Rennie wrote:
>>
>>> P.S. I have a feeling this might be related to my problem with screen 
>>> were it gives "sorry, no more PTYs" when I run it as anybody other 
>>> than root.
>>
>> Is /dev/pts mounted?
>>
>> Cameron
>>
> 
> gatekeeper:/home/rennie# mount
> /dev/hda4 on / type reiserfs (rw)
> proc on /proc type proc (rw)
> sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
> devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
> tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rennie

This is still confusing the hell out of me.

Some Googling revealed a couple of answers like Cameron's, but I just 
can't see any clues as to what might be wrong with my machine. I've even 
got another Debian machine here to compare it against and I can't see 
what is different.

Does anybody have any ideas as to what I should look at/check/compare?

The last couple of lines of "strace screen" are as below:

.........
lstat64("/var/run/screen", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0775, st_size=120, ...}) = 0
fstat64(1, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0620, st_rdev=makedev(136, 1), ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 
0) = 0x401d5000
write(1, "Directory \'/var/run/screen\' must"..., 49Directory 
'/var/run/screen' must have mode 777.
) = 49
munmap(0x401d5000, 4096)                = 0
exit_group(1)                           = ?

This is saying that /var/run/screen have 777 permissions but on the 
Debian box it is as below - exactly the same - and that works fine.

rennie at OFDAMF:~$ ls -l /var/run/ | grep screen
drwxrwxr-x  3 root        utmp        4096 2005-08-15 11:26 screen


I'd love to hear suggestions.

Cheers,