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Geoff FreemanFlag for United States of America

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Can't switch from GUI to text login from Console

After my SCO system boots up, the first screen displayed at the console is the GUI login.  In the past, I could use CTRL-ALT F2 and switch to a "text" based login, or multiscreen login.  However, something has happened to cause only the SCO help screen (which only describes how multi-screen logins work) to display when using this key combination.  So, I cannot use a text login from the console at this point, which is a real pain.  This happened over a weekend.  The system was up, but to my knowledge no one was even logged on.

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yuzh

Normally, you can use "<Alt><Ctrl><Fn> to switch to a different multiscreen,
then <Alt><Ctrl><F2> to return to tty02 where the X server is running. Your video display should be back to normal.

If it doesn't work, have a look at /var/adm/messages file to see if there is any error messages.

or try to reboot the box to see if it can fix the problem.
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ASKER

First, reboot did nothing.  Second, I can't switch screens using the keyboard selections, which is the whole problem.  Although I didn't see error messages in /var/adm, I did see several of the following in syslog:
Jun 10 07:51:32 scosysv telnetd[8298]: unable to write terminal control database entry for line ttyp2
Jun 10 08:19:14 scosysv telnetd[15561]: unable to write terminal control database entry for line ttyp29
Jun 10 08:28:34 scosysv telnetd[8469]: unable to write terminal control database entry for line ttyp4

Is the a correlation between the problem and these messages perhaps?
try the followings to see if you can fix the "terminal control database" problem:

login as root, type in:
1) make up the difference /etc/inittab terminal control database defined tty equipment , type in:
# ttyupd

2)fill in the missing database pseudo-ttys control terminal (/dev/ttyp?)
 /tcb/bin/ale /etc/auth/system/ttys pttyupd

then
reboot
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Chris B
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That works fine because the GUI really isn't used at all!!
I would suggest that the <Ctrl> key wasn't working for some reason.
The only way to activate the GUI multiscreen Help window is by pressing <ALt><F2> thru <Alt><F10>