A tty is just an extra terminal session on your computer.
This howto is about how to disable extra tty's on your computer.
Ubuntu and all it's variants (inc. #! Crunchbang) have 6 tty's enabled, and your X session (the graphical interface) is held on the 7th
You can switch tty's using the Alt+Fn keys (Alt+F1, Alt+F2, etc.), though not while you are in an X session (logged into your normal #!)
Switching tty's can be useful if your boot or shutdown stalls, as if you switch to a random tty then back to tty1 (Alt+F1) you will see where your system has hanged
The first thing that needs to be done is change the setting that says how many tty's are available
To do this, you have to edit /etc/default/console-setup
sudo nano /etc/default/console-setup
Change the ACTIVE_CONSOLES=”/dev/tty[1-6]” setting to reflect how many tty's you want available. It is inadvisable to make this less than 2, though I suggest 3 or 4 is a more sensible option, so the line would then be:
ACTIVE_CONSOLES=”/dev/tty[1-4]”
now you have to edit the tty files to stop them running on systemboot.
cd /etc/event.d/
Now you will change the ttyx files that you don't want. Edit them and comment lines starting with “start on runlevel”. There will be two lines in each file to comment out. In my example, you'll comment the start lines in tty5 and tty6 files.
As I mentioned previously, X is held on the tty7 slot. Note that this does not change, even if you decrease the number of tty's you have.