missing virtual terminals

**urlwolf** · May 13th, 2012

My HP 8540w has spotty 'resume' (from memory).
That is, 80% of the time, it'd come back, the rest it'll just show a blank screen. In the linux world, this is sort of expected for a laptop. This is how bad things are.

But I suspect it's an X crash. If I could at least get to a terminal, I could restart X.

What I've found is that I have no virtual terminals (!).
That is, ctrl alt F1-F7 does nothing!

This is very serious. I'm running KDE and the proprietary nvidia drivers. But I don't think that matters much.

Where would you start debugging?
Thanks

**steeldriver** · May 13th, 2012

Originally Posted by urlwolf

But I suspect it's an X crash. If I could at least get to a terminal, I could restart X.

What I've found is that I have no virtual terminals (!).
That is, ctrl alt F1-F7 does nothing!

doesn't that rather suggest it's *not* an X crash?

I am in a somewhat similar situation with an old Thinkpad - it turns out in my case that *everything* is resuming (including the X session and applications) but the LCD backlight is just not switching on, so *all* TTYs are dark

I can confirm this by SSH'ing into it - or in fact if I connect an external VGA monitor - those are the 2 first things I'd try

**markbl** · May 14th, 2012

The proprietary nvidia driver on 12.04 has a few bugs, for some hardware. E.g. for me current + beta versions crash frequently and also virtual terminals don't work at all. See my comment here https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bu...5/comments/136.

I am now using the open nouveau driver and all is well, including virtual terminals.

**urlwolf** · May 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by markbl

The proprietary nvidia driver on 12.04 has a few bugs, for some hardware. E.g. for me current + beta versions crash frequently and also virtual terminals don't work at all. See my comment here https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bu...5/comments/136.

I am now using the open nouveau driver and all is well, including virtual terminals.

Thanks,
I'll try that. I moved to proprietary because with noveau I had plenty of crashes too.
What a pain, there's not a single distro in 10 years that has worked 100% with ANY hardware.
Now I cannot get the keyboard to work when resuming. Bah!
UPDATE: tried noveau. VTs are still gone. Maybe this is kde?
noveau couldn't even get the correct native resolution of the laptop screen, and didn't even see the external monitor. Had to go back to nvidia. Well, this is not the quality I was expecting for a LTS...

**urlwolf** · May 16th, 2012

Doesn't seem to be kde.
At least one other kde distro doesn't have this problem (sabayon).

**CraigPid** · December 14th, 2012

I realize that this is an old post but no one really seems to have any sound advice on this issue that I've found.The most simple obvious explanation....do you have a keyboard that has other actions available for the F keys?Is there an F Lock button?

**steeldriver** · December 14th, 2012

Welcome - yes it is a rather old post

FWIW on my nvidia based laptop (not the one I posted about earlier in the thread) I found that I had to 'unblacklist' the nvidia framebuffer device to get *my* VTs to display

**markbl** · December 14th, 2012

Back at the time I posted about this it was due to a bug in the nvidia driver. However, recent nvidia versions are ok (since v302.*?).

**s_raiguel** · January 29th, 2013

Same problem. Ever since I got my new system, with an Nvidia GForce GTX 650 Ti, no virtual terminals with ctrl-alt-Fn, just a black screen with a blinking cursor. The TTY processess are running, and it's not a problem with the supported video modes in grub.conf, as some have suggested. Nor is it strictly a hardware problem, since a previous distro running on an old drive still gives normal access to the terminals. I suspect the difference is due to the newer Nvidia drivers on the current system, but so far, efforts to install that older Nvidia driver on the current system have not been successful

The terminal is in fact, there and running- it's simply not displaying anything but the blinking cursor. I discovered that if I log in "blind" and enter a command, such as "restart", it carries out that command.

Today, however, I made a curious discovery, which may be a clue, and at the very least constitutes a workaround: If I first boot into recovery mode, then select "resume", then when the GUI comes up, I can get the terminal, with it's login prompt displayed as it's supposed to be. Seems to me that some aspect of the display is being initialized by the recovery console that is skipped or not being given enough time to respone during a normal boot.