Who is messing with Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2,3,4,5,6} ?

[Richard Elkins]

Okay, I conducted a weird experiment.  I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and 
pretended that the desktop was just covering up the getty login screen.  
I proceeded to login as root and I rebooted the system just using the 
keyboard without the benefit of being able to see what I was typing.  It 
worked.

So, Ctrl-Alt-F{1,2,3,4,5,6} is indeed being processed but it looks like 
Xorg or XFCE is covering up the getty login screen.  Why???

Still scratching my head.  Any ideas?


On 09/24/2013 01:22 PM, Richard Elkins wrote:
> There are emergencies (E.g. hosed desktop) when one would like to 
> gather evidence and find out who is doing what to whom -or- who is 
> waiting for whom.  I have always used Ctrl-Alt-Fn to break out of 
> desktops for this purpose.  I would have found this quite helpful in 
> writing up a bug report yesterday.
>
> Unfortunately, it seems that I cannot do this in Xubuntu which is, of 
> course, XFCE4-based - at least in the later releases.
>
> When I press Ctrl-Alt-F1/2/3/4/5/6, my keyboard and mouse are no 
> longer functional although the screen is still there.  Is the screen 
> hiding the tty login prompt?  My getty sessions are running as 
> evidenced by `ps ax | grep getty` in a terminal window.
>
> Fortunately, when I press F7, I am taken back to normal desktop 
> operation.
>
> Could anyone shed some light on this?  I really would like to learn 
> what component(s) are causing this anomalous behavior.  And, I'd like 
> to fix this if possible.  Again, if it is my @#$%^&!!! Intel D2550MUD2 
> motherboard, I am going to sue Intel into insolvency!  (-:
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard