[SOLVED] Can't reach CRTL-ALT-F2 terminal (or others)

[CCC_037]

Hi, all.

So, I installed a nice fresh gentoo install on a laptop, started installing X... all seemed to be going well. Until I tried using crtl-alt-f2 to switch to a second terminal.

And it didn't work - I just got a tilde on my prompt instead, as it it was trying to represent a normally unprintable character.

Checking with ps -ax tells me that there are other tty's running, but I can't seem to switch over to them. I'm not sure where to start figuring this one out. It's a shiny new system, so it's quite possible that there's something strange going on in the setup somehow, but where do I even look? (There shouldn't be strangeness. It should be a pretty standard setup.) I googled for a similar issue and found a guy whose issue turned out to be that he's plugged in his keyboard over USB instead of ps2 (with an adapter); in my case, however, it's a laptop and the keyboard doesn't unplug.

Where do I look to try to find out what's going on?

[halcon]

Hi, CCC_037.

Hardly to happen in a pretty standard setup, but still...
Virtual Consoles switching can be disabled by xkb_symbols (while running X).
There is a utility x11-apps/setxkbmap. If you have it installed you can run

[CCC_037]

Haven't quite got X running yet, mainly because I haven't downloaded (and installed) a window manager yet - but that's (probably) irrelevant to the immediate topic. So I'm unable to switch when X is not running.

[halcon]

[CCC_037]

Ah, I believe you have solved it, thank you!

When I use acpi_listen, I find that hitting F2 (with or without the CTRL-ALT) sends a "button/volumedown" instead - and, sure enough, there's a volume-down image printed on my F2 button. It seems I need to first hold down the fn button, then hit CTRL-ALT, and finally hit F2 - and then it works!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

[halcon]

You're welcome!

EDIT: I think that buttons behaviour could be changed in BIOS.