Comment 2 for bug 980917

Hi Tim - the messages you are receiving are expected behaviour since Upstart is signalling an error condition - the environment it expects is not correct. Upstart currently expects /dev/pts to be mounted and the /dev/ptmx device to exist by the time it starts. On Ubuntu, this is currently handled by the initramfs. It is also possible from what you say that your custom kernel does not have full pty support enabled? A workaround for the messages is to boot with '--no-log' (see http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#command-line-options) with the implication that all job output is discarded (as it used to be before job logging was added to Upstart).