Thanks for sharing all this good stuff! On another front, do you (or anyone monitoring this thread) have any idea why the supposedly "magical" key-combo ctrl-alt-F1 (and its siblings) are not available on most machines? I can get to the text console windows by issuing sudo chvt 1 from a terminal emulator, so I know they're out there, but sometimes I just really miss that keyboard shortcut. The combo ctrl-alt-F5 does work to get me back to the graphical environment, but then the capability is gone again. I checked the state of the kernel parameter with
Code:
cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
and it is 1 (on), so that other combo you mentioned as "magical" should be enabled.

Cheers!
Krishna