LinuxQuestions.org - blank virtual console?

- Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)

- - blank virtual console? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/blank-virtual-console-124652/)

blank virtual console?

hello there.

i just newly installed red hat 9.0, dual-booting with winxp. xp and the linux desktop work fine.

however, when i try to do a Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or f2, f3) to get to a virtual console, all i get is a blank screen. nada. this goes on for a long time until i get impatient and just ctrl-alt-delete twice to restart. i've tried thrice and got the same result.

any idea why?

thanks in advance!

No clue why that's happening, but hitting Alt-F7 should take you back to your gui desktop. If that doesn't work, try doing Alt-Fx with x=1 through 6 and see if you can get back to the gui.

Alt-Fx turned out to be shortcuts (Alt-f2 for example opens Run Program dialog).
Alt-F7 and Ctl-Alt-F7 did get me back to the gui.

One thing I noticed, though. Riight before I do a gui login, the virtualconsole login appears very, very quickly (I have a newbie book in front of me, that's how I knew it was a virtual console login). This last time, I was able to "catch" it and type my username, but just the same, it disappeared and proceeded to load the gui.

???

help please, anyone?

Clueless about RH but maybe you're booting to a GUI by default and RH disables virtual consoles in that runlevel? Edit /etc/inittab to go to a console runlevel and/or add consoles to all runlevels?

Alt-F[n] cycles you through consoles - Ctrl-Alt-F[n] breaks you out of a GUI if there's any console to go to.

thanks for your replies.

i tried changing the runlevel to a "3" and i got a console. i was able to play around with it fine. i "startx" and i got the gui fine. when i pressed ctl-alt-fn again to go back to the console, i got a blank screen again.

Post your /etc/inittab file. That's what spawns the virtual terminals on boot by calling a "getty" program located in /sbin; the common ones are getty, agetty or mingetty. Here's mine from mandrake:

Code:

#

# inittab      This file describes how the INIT process should set up

#              the system in a certain run-level.

#

# Author:      Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>

#              Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes

#



# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by Mandrake Linux are:

#  0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)

#  1 - Single user mode

#  2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)

#  3 - Full multiuser mode

#  4 - unused

#  5 - X11

#  6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)

# 

id:5:initdefault:



# System initialization.

si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit



l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0

l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1

l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2

l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3

l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4

l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5

l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6



# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE

ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now



# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes

# of power left.  Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.

# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your

# UPS connected and working correctly.  

pf::powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"



# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.

pr:12345:powerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"





# Run gettys in standard runlevels

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2

3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3

4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4

5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5

6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

The last six lines are for creating the virtual terminals 1 thru 6. The "respawn" in each line is important. That means that init should restart the command given in the entry when the getty process dies which is every time a user logs out. The "getty" program executes /bin/login to initiate a login session on that terminal.

Quote:

Originally posted by yanar99
... i "startx" and i got the gui fine. when i pressed ctl-alt-fn again to go back to the console, i got a blank screen again.

Try

Code:

startx &

Silly aside: You made sure there is no screen saver running?