I have no consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F1 does nothing) ;(

[Tommy Trussell]

On 1/18/07, Ben Edwards <funkytwig at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/01/07, Brian Fahrlander <brian at fahrlander.net> wrote:
> > Ben Edwards wrote:
> > > Wren I press Ctrl+Alt+F1 at the same time nothing happens.  It seems
> > > my consoles are not running.  Any ideas?
> >
> >     USB Keyboard?  That's what does it here, on my machines.  The bios
> > chooses one socket and needs a certain (perhaps "legacy") mode.
>
> Its a Dell Insperon 2650 laptop using its internal keyboard.

I know nothing about your specific situation (you didn't even state
which version of Ubuntu you're using), but I had the same problem on
my Mac PowerBook G3 for the Ubuntu 5.04 and 5.10 releases, but it was
fixed in Dapper 6.06. I believe the problem was the (then new) xorg
wasn't passing the keystrokes to invoke the VTs.

You might try opening a terminal window and using this command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and pay very careful attention to the keyboard options to be sure
yours is set to match your hardware (probably pc104). This process
will create a new xorg.conf configuration file (saving your old one
with the date) so you can also hand-tweak it if necessary.
UNFORTUNATELY I can't advise you on the exact options to select. I
Googled your model number and xorg.conf and there are several
around... you might look at your xorg.conf to see if it looks similar.