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After upgrading to 17.10 like a true pioneer, I found the old CtrlAltF1 no longer switches between console mode and GUI, and a quick Google search brought up nothing useful. Was this feature removed entirely?

muru
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Aero Windwalker
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  • What happens when you do press Ctrl-Alt-F1? – muru Nov 22 '17 at 06:58
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    @muru he ends up on login screen, the actual loaded GUI is like it seems on tty2, or at least it is on my 17.10. Just confirmed it too on a plain 17.10 VM. – Videonauth Nov 22 '17 at 07:02
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    @Videonauth I see. It seems that's also the problem in https://askubuntu.com/questions/969519/ubuntu-17-10-ctrlaltf1-locks-the-screen – muru Nov 22 '17 at 07:04
  • @muru yes indeed this is the case on that question you mentioned too. – Videonauth Nov 22 '17 at 07:09
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    @Videonauth I removed the 17.10 tag since the bug report indicates this is a GDM default and not specific to 17.10. (Presumably users of Ubuntu GNOME in earlier versions would also have this problem.) – muru Nov 22 '17 at 07:13
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    @muru I'm not sure about removing the 17.10 tag - most users will first encounter this when they upgrade to 17.10 so although you are strictly speaking correct, to be helpful it might be worth leaving the tag there? – nickcrabtree Nov 27 '17 at 17:11
  • @nickcrabtree and how does the tag help? The question already mentioned 17.10, and we have already established that this GDM behaviour has been around since 16.10. Most users search first without tags, after all. – muru Nov 27 '17 at 23:16
  • @nickcrabtree And the same behavior as well applies to 18.04. – Videonauth Apr 28 '18 at 08:44

1 Answers1

85

The actual used tty consoles have changed around with the introduction of Wayland and 17.10. Now tty1 always contains the login screen, and tty2 contains your actual loaded session.

So use Ctrl+Alt+F3 up to Ctrl+Alt+F7 for getting to an actual unused tty and use Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go back to GUI.

From the 17.10 Release Notes:

  • GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager. The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.

Also see Why is my GDM at a different TTY than my desktop environment? for more about the origin of this change.

muru
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Videonauth
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    Hmm Ctrl+Alt+F7 is not a working TTY. It just displays a blinking cursor if you can even change to it. – zenw0lf Dec 23 '17 at 16:12
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    @zenw0lf on some systems F7 fails just use a lower number :) like ctryl+alt+F3. The 7th one sometimes fails to initialize. – Videonauth Dec 24 '17 at 14:07
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    @karel same shortcuts apply on 18.04 too – Videonauth Apr 28 '18 at 08:30
  • I just want to note that the two running Xorg servers has other repercussions as well. gksudo and other use of the $DISPLAY env variable will expect a value of ':0' but that will be now taken up by the greeter screen and is unused. check out ps aux | grep Xorg then ls /tmp/.X11-unix to see what I mean. You will need to change the value of $DISPLAY to be ':1' upon login to thwart display errors. That will point to the X11 socket that is owned by your user. – brianclements May 25 '18 at 20:23