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After booting to the GUI in 12.04, I attempt to move to the virtual terminal (or shell, or tty) via Ctrl-Alt-F1 (F1 - 6), and the screen remains blank. I'm tried all 6 tty instances and the results are the same. Ctrl-alt-F7 brings me back to the GUI without a problem. Any thoughts?

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This occurs often together with being unable to see Grub of the boot splash. Can you see those? – ObsessiveSSOℲ Jul 11 '12 at 20:11

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This is usually caused because the graphical text-mode resolution set at boot up is not compatible with your video card. The solution is to switch to true text-mode by configuring Grub appropriately:

  1. Open the terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T

  2. Paste the below, and enter your password when asked:

    sudo sed -i -e 's/#GRUB_TERMINAL/GRUB_TERMINAL/g' /etc/default/grub

  3. Then type sudo update-grub

  4. Reboot and the virtual terminals should now work.
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That did it, thanks! It made the text a bit bigger than I would like once it reset to default. I opened the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to edit the text size and the first line states "do not edit". Suppose that's a question for another day though. Thanks for the help – SeanO Jul 12 '12 at 16:37

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