Is your base system really old, by any chance?
What happened is that not only are the DEVPTS things new, but there was
also a cleanup: the old-style pty numbering was finally dropped.
Originally, Linux-1.0 and earlier used pty's by having major number 4
and taking minors 128-191 for masters, and 192-255 for slaves. We
fairly quickly found out that 64 pty's is too little for a lot of
machines.
So the new setup is that major #2 is the pty master major number, and
slaves are at major #3. To make the transition easier, the old numbers
still worked. This was done before 2.0.
All even remotely new distributions should have the new major numbers,
but if you've upgraded over a long time you may have a really old base
system. And then the pty's don't work at all, because they no longer
exist as far as the kernel is concerned..
The easiest way to fix this is to get a /dev/MAKEDEV from a newer
distribution, and then just run
su
cd /dev
./MAKEDEV pty
or similar.
(Side note: the new numbering has been the standard for something like 3
years or more, so you really have to be an old-timer to have this
problem.)
Linus
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