SOLVED: Halp, “screen” is broken on CentOS on my Linode instance!

So while migrating some content to a Linode instance, I attempted to fire up screen ran face first into a brick wall. For context, this was on an up-to-date CentOS 5.5 instance running screen-4.0.3-3.el5. Steps to reproduce:

• logged in as my normal user
• typed in “screen” and hit enter
• console went blank for 5 seconds
• previous content returned, along with “[screen is terminating]” and my normal command prompt.

Screen didn’t work for any regular users, however it did work for root.

I reinstalled the package, compared it to another centOS server, compared configs checked strace, etc. I could find no reason for this behavior.

Eventually I noticed I was using ttyp0 rather than pts/0 for my TTY; It was the only difference I could see between the two CentOS servers. Since I’d never seen ttyp (that I recall), it struck me as weird. I wasn’t sure if this was related to the fact that the broken instance was a xen guest or what.

It turns out, when Linode builds their CentOS image, they cut the following line out of /etc/fstab:

/dev/ptmx /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0

That prevents pts from existing, causing you to fall back to the older ttyp, which is apparently incompatible with screen.

once I got that puppy mounted, everything was good.