Unable to switch to Serial Console

IcEonFirE · Apprentice Joined: 15 Aug 2004 Posts: 174

Hi

When I use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to serial console, nothing happened. I had this work last week it suddenly stopped working. Any Issue please ?

Thanks

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

What desktop environment or window manager would be in use when changing virtual terminals fails?

iguana chute · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 15

I don't have a GUI working yet, so this may be totally irrelevant, but try to run the top command. On my system this shows multiple instances of the agetty process. When I log out of a terminal, another instance of agetty shows up. According to the agetty man page, which says agetty opens serial consoles, it is generally started by init, but it looked like you could start one manually. Maybe there's a problem with init. Hope it helps. Also: In top, if you press c, it shows which terminals each agetty corresponds to. Again, this is in text mode, not X, so I'm not sure it helps.

Doogman · Apprentice Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 242

First thing, you are talking about a virtual console, not a serial console. A serial console would be something hooked to one of the serial ports.

Next, did you try CTRL-ALT-F2? On my box with the Nvidia drivers, CTRL-ALT-F1 doesn't work, but F2 does. From there I can switch to F1, if I wish. I'm not sure why it works this way, but it's been like this for a long time.