OK, some more information: I rebooted to a non-xen kernel (2.6.18-348.1.1.el5), and the problem remains, so it is not xen or a xen kernel issue. The machine has an AMD 64-bit processor (AMD Sempron(tm) Processor LE-1300), if that makes any difference. I have a LD450 keyboard (DEC VT220 flavored ps2 keyboard). The keyboard does work: the X server properly intercepts Ctrl-Alt-Fn and does a proper chvt call. The *kernel* itself is not handling Ctrl-Alt-Fn. (It is handling Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but I suspect that is something completely different.) My 32-bit laptop, running kernel 2.6.18-348.1.1.el5 is working just fine -- the kernel there is properly handling Ctrl-Alt-Fn and switches between consoles without problems. Oh, both machines boot to runlevel 3 and I use startx to fire up X (I loath graphical logins). At Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:26:14 -0400 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: > > I am not sure what I did, but for some reason Ctrl-Alt-F? bindings are > broken on 64-bit xen desktop machine (but not on my laptop (32-bit, no > xen)). Both machines are (mostly) up-to-date and running CentOS 5.9. > I rarely hop to different Virtual Consoles (eg Ctrl-Alt-F1 ... > Ctrl-Alt-F7), but today I wanted to go to the main console to watch > some kernel verbage (I was checking something with hot-swap SATA disk). > I discovered that I could not switch back to my X11 session > (Ctrl-Alt-F7)! I did some googling, but did not find anything. So far > as I can tell, I can switch to one of the other VT (Ctrl-Alt-Fn) *from* > VT7 (my X11 session), but cannot then switch to any other VT from > there, using the Ctrl-Alt-F? key bindings. The chvt command works, but > the keybindings don't. It is most strange. I know this used to work > (and still does work just fine on my laptop, running much the same > system, including the same X11 configuration, with the same desktop > setup (plain fvwm in MWM compatibity mode, same keybindings, etc.). > Other than different video cards (and thus different X11 drivers) and > 32-bit vs 64-bit and with xen virtualization on the 64-bit desktop box, > the system setups are virtually identical. > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments