Troubleshooting the problem "Terminal won't start X, complaining on vtconsole"

If you happen to stumble upon "" message (I did, while fitting LTSP4.2 into OpenVZ container) with X server mentioning "vtconsole" as a wrong parameter and you've grepped through the whole (LTSP) filesystem to understand it wasn't static, the problem might be in /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/screen.d/startx which apparently doesn't validate `tty` output (in my case, got "/dev/console" instead of e.g. "/dev/tty1").

This quick fix should help:

--- ./etc/screen.d/startx-orig   2006-09-22 16:31:42 +0400
+++ ./etc/screen.d/startx   2006-09-22 17:10:41 +0400
@@ -17,7 +17,8 @@
 XDM_SERVER=${XDM_SERVER:-${DEFAULT_SERVER}}
 reg_info XDM_SERVER
 
-TTY=`/usr/bin/basename \`/usr/bin/tty\` | sed s/tty//`
+# actually TTY should be checked for being numeric with fallback to "1"...
+TTY=`/usr/bin/basename \`/usr/bin/tty\` | sed s/tty// | sed s/console/1/`
 XFCFG=/tmp/XF86Config.${TTY}
 export TTY

-- MichaelShigorin - 22 Sep 2006