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I don't usually use a virtual terminal and I don't know what possesed me to go into one, but I did using the standard ctrl-alt-F[1-6]. I looked around and didn't edit anything, I was just exploring. When done, I exited the terminal and was back at the login prompt. I did the normal return trick of ctrl-alt-F7 and was greeted with the text "could not write bytes: pipe broken". I did a bunch of Google searching and found a suggestion of using ctrl-alt-F8 instead, that gave me a black screen with a blicking cursor in the upper left of the screen. Another suggestion is video drivers, so I made sure I had the latest and greatest since the ones during the install were out of date by one rev. Same thing. The only thing getting me out of the black screen and login prompt was either ctrl-alt-del or sudo reboot. One way out and back to the desktop was to login to a virtual terminal, stop mdm, and then startx. That got me back to the gui, but doing a "who" on the terminal showed me what I expected: my vitual terminal, was still on and the gui was if I had relogged on. This is ungood and I'm sure it isn't the right way to exit a virtual terminal.

Details: kernel: 3.2.0-23-generic gpu: nVidia 9800GT 512M ram CPU: Intel i7 920 Ram: 6G
After rebooting like normal into Maya, I did a "who" on the terminal and sure enough there was one user and he was on tty 8 port :0.

Any suggestions? I didn't find any bug reports, but they seem to be hard to find anyway, so I probably missed it if it were there in the list.

Hello, motsteve.

Hm. Personally, the situation is quite normal on my machines: <ctrl><alt><f1> to <ctrl><alt><f6> will take me from the graphical desktop to my 6 text ttys (tty1 to tty6). Pressing <alt><f8> will take me back to the graphical desktop. This is true on Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon and xfce as well as on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin. So I am not sure whether this suggests a problem at all.
In very rare cases where the X server had died and been restarted, the graphical desktop had even moved to tty9, so I had to press <alt><f9> to go back to it. But here this happened only in the early months of Mint 13. Have not experienced this behaviour for months now.

Kind regards,
Karl
--
Lint Mint 13 Cinnamon 1.4 UP3
Lint Mint 13 Xfce 4.10

The graphical terminals can be on tty7 - tty9

karlchen wrote:Hello, motsteve.

Hm. Personally, the situation is quite normal on my machines: <ctrl><alt><f1> to <ctrl><alt><f6> will take me from the graphical desktop to my 6 text ttys (tty1 to tty6). Pressing <alt><f8> will take me back to the graphical desktop. This is true on Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon and xfce as well as on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin. So I am not sure whether this suggests a problem at all.
In very rare cases where the X server had died and been restarted, the graphical desktop had even moved to tty9, so I had to press <alt><f9> to go back to it. But here this happened only in the early months of Mint 13. Have not experienced this behaviour for months now.

Kind regards,
Karl
--
Lint Mint 13 Cinnamon 1.4 UP3
Lint Mint 13 Xfce 4.10

This is exactly what I've experienced, but not for some time either . Ctrl+Alt+F8 is typically what returns me to the graphical interface.
Edit: I do seem to remember Ubuntu 11.10 (the first linux distro I used) using Ctrl+Alt+F7 (though I could be wrong), but F8 is what I've been using since at least Mint 13, if not Mint 12 as well.

Well, I guess there's nothing left to try but F9. Getting back is a pain.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Just got back from trying a virtual termain ctrl-alt-F1, logged in as root, explored around and did an exit to get back to login prompt. Hit ctrl-alt-F9 and the machine and the log in prompt justed stayed on. I left and got some lemonade and came back to the SOS. So again, I logged in as root and did a reboot.

I'm not going to use virtual terminals on Mint, I guess. I need to try this on Ubuntu 12.04 and see what happens. I also have Ubuntu 12.10, Debian 6.0.6 and Mint 11 on my other partitions in my multiboot menu.

Actually, I can't think of a practical reason to use a virtual terminal any way.

Steve

In my experience the need for the virtual console seems to come up when the GUI is acting up or freezing

If your cinnamon gui freezes and you don't know what to do here's a solution:

open terminal and type: sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc
Enter your password
Add a new line at the bottom of this file and add this line
alias cinnamon-restart='cinnamon --replace -d :0.0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &'

The next time your Cinnamon desktop freezes and you don't know what to do:
Press Ctrl-Alt-F1

Login with your username and password in the terminal

Type: cinnamon-restart

Take a deep breath and press: Ctrl-Alt-F8
Login with your username and password and now you are safe.
Cheers