I'm unable to return to the GUI with Ctrl-Alt-F7
(or any of the 12 function keys). I have some unsaved work and I don't want to lose them. Are there any other key combinations that will allow me to switch back?
Here is what I did:
- I pressed
Ctrl-Alt-F1
and it showed a text-based login screen as usual - Then I pressed
Ctrl-Alt-F7
and it showed a screen full of text (I can't remember what they were) - Then I pressed
Ctrl-Alt-F8
and it showed log messages that resembles/var/log/messages
. Some entries are fromautomount
, some fromsendmail
, and none are errors. - Pressing any of the
Ctrl-Alt-Fn
combinations now has no effect. The cap-lock and num-lock LED no longer respond to their corresponding keys. I can use the mouse to highlight the text on the screen, but nothing else.
Any idea what happened?
I can still login to the system via SSH. GUI applications that I was using (e.g. opera
) are still running and consuming tiny amounts of CPU as usual, as reported by top
. Is it possible to switch back to the GUI via the command line? If possible, I don't want to restart X, because doing so will kill all the GUI applications.
System info:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.7
Linux 2.6.18-238.12.1.el5 SMP x86_64
gnome-desktop: 2.16.0-1.fc6
xorg-x11-server-Xorg: 1.1.1-48.76.el5_7.5
Thanks to Shawn I was able to get back using chvt 9
.
Further experiments shows that if I go to the 8th virtual terminal (either by Ctrl-Alt-F8
or chvt 8
), I will not be able to switch to any other terminals using Ctrl-Alt-Fx
keys. Now sure if this is a bug.
Best Answer
chvt
allows you to change your virtual terminal.From
man chvt
: