On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 06:02:30PM -0500, Stephen Powell wrote: > I have been having trouble lately with losing access to my graphical console. > The basic symptom is that I am in the graphical console, I switch to a text > console via Ctrl+Alt+F1, do some stuff in the text console, then when I > attempt to switch back to the graphical console again with Alt+F7, I get > a black screen. I can then switch back to console number 1 simply by > using Alt+F1. I don't need to include the Ctrl key. This would normally > indicate to me that the X server died somehow, except that "ps aux" > still shows processes associated with the X server, such as gdm, active. > > I am running the GNOME desktop on a Debian "testing" system. All packages > are from testing, none are from unstable. I can't swear to this, but > I think my troubles began with kernel 2.6.32. One scenario that often > causes this failure is when the little "sun" icon appears in the upper > right corner, indicating that there are updates available. I switch > to text console number 1 via Ctrl+Alt+F1, login as root, run "dselect > update", "aptitude -R full-upgrade", and "aptitude clean". I then attempt > to switch back to the graphical desktop with Alt+F7 to cleanly shut > things down in preparation for a reboot. But I can't get there. > Has anybody else seen or heard of this problem? I did some internet > searches, but didn't turn up anything that looked promising. Have you checked Alt+F8, Alt+F9, possibly even beyond? On one of my systems, for reasons that are still unclear to me, GDM occasionally runs somewhere between tty8-10 after I've logged in and out a few times. I can only guess it's restarting before it's fully stopped. Cheers, Tom -- Do you mean that you not only want a wrong answer, but a certain wrong answer? -- Tobaben
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