<control><alt><F2> you will drop out of X and be at the REAL consoles. Login and see what "who" tells you. <alt><F1> thru <alt><F6> are your basic REAL consoles. <alt><F7> is reserved for X.
We're way past the level of info the original poster wanted, but just to clarify this: what you get to when you hit <alt-Fn> is a previously opened *virtual* terminal. These are started at boot time and have specific device files: /dev/ttyX. The one, single, real console is generally on <alt-F1>: /dev/tty0 (or an alternative if reconfigured). The poster was refering to *pseudo* terminals, which don't exist until requested via the master /dev/ptmx interface. At that point the pseudo terminal connection is created-on-demand for the xterm or whatever to use. -- The past: Smart users in front of dumb terminals