I saw something like the problem in bugs #566501 and #570338 since about February and just spent some time with a more knowledgeable collegue to investigate.
I have two PCs that I run with the 'testing' distribution. On one of these PCs, from February thru July, I was able to change the line in /etc/default/console-setup from: VERBOSE_OUTPUT="no" to VERBOSE_OUTPUT="yes" to fix the problem on one of my systems. When I did a upgrade in August, the problem re-occurred, and the final VT could be any of tty[1-6] after booting. (My other PC never exhibited this problem in any way.) We found this thread: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/11/15/72, talking about a problem in /usr/bin/consolechars (package: console-tools) that seems to explain this problem as being in the kernel. We couldn't find any patch that fixed it. '/usr/bin/consolechars' is used by '/bin/setupcon' which is used in '/etc/init.d/console-setup' (both in package: console-setup) which is where my system seemed to have the problem. I hacked '/bin/setupcon' to save the vt number at entry (from '/bin/fgconsole') and restored it at exit (with '/usr/bin/chvt'). This fixed the problem on my PC. '/usr/bin/consolechars' is also used by /etc/init.d/console-screen.sh (package: console-tools) which might explain the behavior in bug #566501. I found it is also used by '/usr/bin/charset' and '/usr/bin/unicode_start' (also package: console-tools). Hope this helps Paul Higgins -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org