Virtual terminals?

[mecho]

May be it's time to close this thread, but it still bugs me .
I think you have an issue with you keyboard mappings. There is one way to find out.
Run xev - in terminal and then press and hold the F1 key and see if it registers properly in xev, do the same with CTRL and ALT. I bet you might have to switch to other xkbModel or xkbLayout setting. Also if this is the reason you might find out some other key combination not functioning properly

[mecho]

Easier then this is to run:
xmodmap -pk | egrep '^[ ]+67 '
and you should see XF86_Switch_VT_1 in the output. If that's not the case then definitely
your key mappings are wrong. This would restore Virtual terminal switching, but may create bigger problems
xmodmap -e 'keycode 67 = F1 XF86_Switch_VT_1'

[utu]

@krishna

My laptop has a setting in setup (bios)
that toggles the operation of the function keys. You might
look into this aspect, since you don't seem to be getting
the response you expect from the function keys.

[krishna.murphy]

@krishna

My laptop has a setting in setup (bios)
that toggles the operation of the function keys. You might
look into this aspect, since you don't seem to be getting
the response you expect from the function keys.

Thanks for the thought! I've looked around in the several BIOSs involved (3 machines, I think) and didn't see that kind of functionality. Since it's on multiple machines, I figured it was something others would have seen and reported, perhaps.

Cheers!
Krishna