[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#617286: base: ctrl+alt+F# doesn't work/physical screen freezes, mouse and keyboard irresponsive

[dl]

Package: base
Severity: important

Hi all

I didn't know where to report the issue and I have no idea where it's all
about. So the info below is a bit random. My system is updated.

After a recent squeeze update (last week), our system got a bit unstable. We
cannot move to the virtual terminals by pressing ctrl+alt+F# (where # is 1-6);
in fact we can, but we get a black screen and no prompt. But we can still have
multiple graphical terminals at ctrl+alt+F8 and ctrl+alt+F9 when multiple users
are concurrently connected.

The screen got frozen twice (only on the physical monitors). The computer
became irresponsive to keyboard and mouse input: pressing num- or caps-lock
would not switch lights on or off.

I can use gnome normally throught vnc4server (on a different virtual screen
:5902). (There's no keyboard/mouse and no ctrl+alt+F# throught vnc though).

Xorg (user root) was found to be using 100% of one of my CPUs  when the
computer was frozen.

It first happened when the computer screen slept (and I thought it couldn't
wake up), but today according to another user it locked while he was actively
working on the machine. Just in case, I disabled some power management eco
friendly options. Anyway, that does not justify the ctrl+alt+F# failure.

We are using proprietary nvidia driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.29

Sorry for the random bits of information, and any hints are welcome.

Best
dl




-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash