Unfortunately, the real world has been intruding recently.

Over the weekend I will fix the http server and play with the telnet daemon.

However, a search found this http://www.mailgate.org/linux/linux.debian.chinese/msg00016.html,
this http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-sparc-0006/msg00080.html,
this http://www.linuxsa.org.au/mailing-list/1999-07/483.html,
and this http://ftp://ftp.ca.debian.org/pub/linux/docs/lanana/device-list/devices.txt.

Have you tried mknod -m 666 /dev/ptmx c 5 2

It sounds like for debugging, we need to get http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/utils/strace.html.