Switching to tty from X

zahlberer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Jul 2007 Posts: 138

I am sorry for posting this for the thrid time, but I am quite desperate given the lack of help.

Gentoo has been a perfect OS, everything works beautifully. In my case, everything means xterm, latex, firefox and gcc/g++. I am a user of the fluxbox desktop environment.

I am still installing my system and did not install a login manager yet. So everytime I boot my laptop, I login, check there are only 10MB of occupied space, and enter the startx command.

Then I use my PC for around an hour and a half and wish to shut it down. At that time I am faced with a X server running. There is a default command in the fluxbox menu which is named "exit". Issuing that command would result in closing all of my running applications, exit fluxbox and terminate the X server. After that, I should be prompted for the next command in a tty (tty1). At this time I run su - followed by poweroff.

The problem is that eventually the tty does not appear. Exiting X results in turning off my monitor permanently (until I hard reset, of course). This happens too frequently to be tolerable.

I also tried switching to a tty by pressing ctrl + alt + 1. This sometimes work and sometimes fail. The symptoms are the same: a blanked monitor.

I am very frustrated since this is getting to my nervers. I do not want to shutdown my computer by holding the power button for the sad 4 seconds.

So basically my problem is in terminating the X server cleanly or getting to a tty from the X server.

Could someone please, please, please, please help me?

Tyrius · Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 5:41 pm Post subject:

Try ctrl+alt+f11 and then alt+f1.

This will give you the tty prompt. This works from Gnome so should work with your windows manager.

Hope this works for you...

mrybczyn · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 26

I assume its some hardware/video driver issue. Maybe try disabling DPMS in your xorg.conf, if its enabled.

As for powering off, look into ACPI... Once set up properly, this should let you turn off your PC cleanly just like "poweroff".

Basically, you should just hit your power button once, and it should initiate the regular system shutdown for you. My wife's laptop is set up this way. I don't remember the details, I think you need to emerge and rc-update "acpid".

Here's some more info: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_ACPI_basic_configuration

zahlberer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Jul 2007 Posts: 138

Thank you for the hint, I shall press ctrl + alt + f11 and then alt + f11 when I power off.

I have acpid emerged, but its main function is to switch between the default and battery runlevels.

I do not care much about acpi, though. I feel no problem in issuing some command line instructions.

The reason I do not power off hitting the power button yet is that I am unsure whether Xorg will turn off cleanly for me. What if I issue a shutdown and the video does not come back?