I have been having some computing problems lately. My home server runs Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and it suddenly lost its X config, which resulted in a system that wouldn't do more than 800x600. I am still not sure why or how it happened, but it turned out that the automatic detecting of the horizontal sync rate and of the vertical refresh rate of my monitor went foobar. After I specified them manually in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and did a quick sudo invoke-rc.d gdm restart, things were back to normal though.

The other thing that I haven't figured out yet is that I am not able to start any tty's on virtual consoles. /etc/inittab looks normal, so /sbin/init should (re)spaw them. I checked that I am in runlevel 2, /sbin/getty is there and when I start it manually, things appear to be normal, yetI cannot switch to a virtual tty. I am now starting to wonder if the kernel that I have even has support for virtual consoles at all.