On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, david...@freevolt.org wrote: [snip]
Thing 3:If you don't want to wait for reboot, don't feel like making big plans for the future, and just want a VT now, as root do something like # systemctl enable getty@tty8.service
As I just discovered, the "enable" line above is actually the easy way of doing Thing 2. If you only want a one-off tty, the following "start" line is all you need.
# systemctl start getty@tty8.service and then Ctrl-Alt-F8. Hope this helps.
