Comment # 29 on bug 809557 from Franck Bui

(In reply to Egbert Eich from comment #18)
> (In reply to Thomas Blume from comment #15)
> > On a new 13.2 installation there is no /dev/xconsole.
> > It seems that the /dev/xconsole pipe is exlusively created by rsyslogd using
> > /usr/sbin/rsyslog-service-prepare.
> > And apparently rsyslogd is the only one using it.
> > 
> > Is there really a need for /dev/xconsole if rsyslogd is not installed or
> > would xconsole just display /dev/console then?
> 
> No, it should work the other way around: with no rsyslogd around any more,
> and xconsole reading from /dev/console when /dev/xconsole doesn't  exist,
> journald (or whatever) should be taught to write log messages of a certain
> severity etc. to /dev/console.

Well I'm still probably lacking of the background of the xconsole stuff but
after some googling it seems that /dev/xconsole is only used by xconsole(1) and
is created and stuffed by rsyslog *only*.

If /dev/xconsole doesn't exist, which is the case when rsyslog is not used,
xconsole(1) won't read from /dev/console, but instead it will redirect the
console output in its own stdout (see man tty_ioctl(4), TIOCCONS). I've no idea
why xconsole(1) has been modified to read from /dev/xconsole and not from
/dev/console on Linux in the first place.

So if you ask journald to forward messages to the console and to use
/dev/console as console tty (this shouldn't be needed but for an unknown reason
we're carrying a patch that changes this), it should work.

Basically in /etc/journald.conf, you should have:

  ForwardToConsole=yes
  TTYPath=/dev/console

and xconsole(1) should work as expected. Make sure that rsyslog in not
installed otherwise /dev/xconsole will be present and xconsole(1) will use it.

But quite frankly I don't see any points in using/supporting this tool anymore:
it seems part of history and has no real value. One can easily replace it with
"xerm -e /usr/bin/journalctl -f" if he really wants to see the console output
in a window.

xdm requires xconsole which is probably the only reason why xconsole has been
installed in the first place. Such deps should be removed IMHO.