xubuntu 14.04 no virtual terminals

Question

I have an Acer AO722 with the following graphics hardware:

  *-display UNCLAIMED     
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Wrestler [Radeon HD 6290]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 1
       bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0
       version: 00
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:4000(size=256) memory:f0400000-f043ffff

Just upgraded to xubuntu 14.04. All did not go well. Had to move my physical partitions to make room for the new larger boot sector. Also fglrx did not upgrade properly resulting in a max of 1024x768 video resolution. I had to sudo apt-get install --reinstall fglrx it. That got my better video modes back.

Now I notice that, just like with Pangolin, I have no virtual terminals. The crazy thing is, I had them for a while! I know when I first tried, and when I run from live USB I have them.

In addition, video playback is very slow and even mouse movements are jerky.

I've swapped between all varieties of fglrx drivers to no avail. I've Googled extensively and still no answers.

How can I get my virtual terminals back, or is this still an xubuntu bug on my hardware?

Answer 1

The problem was the kernel 'nomodeset' parameter. I switched between the open source and proprietary drivers extensively and the problem only got worse. Eventually I lost the good resolution modes even with the proprietary drivers.

The solution was to remove all fglrx* drivers and install the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver, then remove the 'nomodeset' kernel parameter.

Now I have good video modes, good refresh rate, and VTerms. All is well.