On 23-May-07 18:54:52, Jonathan Arnold wrote:
(Ted Harding) wrote:
On 23-May-07 16:52:24, John E. Perry wrote:
I've seen several statements lately that one gets to the black console screens via alt-F1. When I do this, I get the KDE menu. I have to do ctrl-alt-Fx to get to the consoles.
As far as I know, my system is a simple standard opensuse 10.2 with the basic suse updates through opensuseupdater. No hacks, no obscure window manager additions. Why is my X different? Should I be concerned?
John Perry
The behaviour you describe is standard, and has been, on Linux, since X came in (early-mid 90s).
The "Alt-Fn" statements you have seen refer to swapping between "black consoles". So, from one "black cosole", say Console 1, you can swap to any other, say Console 5, with Alt-F5.
Of course, Alt-F7 will take you to the console which is running X.
From an X console, however, to get to any other console you must use Ctrl-Alt-Fn. So Ctrl-Alt-F1 will take you to "black console" 1, for instance.
The "reason X is different" is that, depending on the window manager, Alt-Fn will have some other function in X. This again is standard.
And that's why it's easier to just get in the Ctrl-Alt-Fn mode, because that works from either a virtual terminal or X.
I recently wrote a short bit about this:
Which is fair anough -- though once you get used to it, it's no
trouble to use Alt-Fn from a console. (Mind you, I got used to
Alt-Fn back in 1992, before X came in, and all you had was "black
consoles" and Alt-Fn. So for me, Ctrl-Alt-Fn is an add-on)!
Of course, the point of all these posts on this thread is to
clarify what was puzzling John Perry in the firstplace. I hope
we've done that!
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding)