How to rollback xorg to working tty switch

[doug at safeport.com]

On Thu, 24 May 2012, Polytropon wrote:

> On Thu, 24 May 2012 20:11:32 +0200, Polytropon wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 May 2012 06:45:06 -0500 (CDT), Lars Eighner wrote:
>>>
>>> I need to rollback x.org to a point that tty switching worked.  I'm dead in
>>> the water when stuck in x.org.
>>
>> Maybe putting
>>
>>         Option	"DontVTSwitch"	"false"
>>
>> in Section "ServerFlags" or /etc/X11/xorg.conf helps?
>
> Of course not "or" - "of". Maybe it belongs to section
> "ServerLayout", I'm not sure, it changes quite often
> which options are supported and where they have to be
> placed. :-)
>
> And in worst case, use "portdowngrade" to get an older version
> of the port (may require recompiling a lot of dependencies in
> both directions).
>
> portdowngrade x11/xorg -s :pserver:anoncvs at anoncvs.tw.FreeBSD.org:/home/ncvs
>
> (Maybe you need to be more specific as "x11" is only a metaport.)

That was such a great idea, I also just tried it. For me at least it is not that 
alt-ctrl-Fn does not switch, it does. What is does not do is connect to the 
monitor except for alt-ctrl-F9. So in the absence of a crash I can:

alt-ctrl-F1 - get a blank screen with the monitor displaying no signal
alt-ctrl-F2 - same thing sometimes required (for me) to make the next one work
alt-ctrl-F9 - back to my desktop

In the event of a crash I am fairly far up the creek. No errors are logged 
anywhere. I installed 9.0-RELEASE #0 and then did a pkg_add for Xorg. In my case 
I would not think there is anything to backup to. I did not see any PRs with 
this symptom. A similar one was deemed user error as I recall. Google finds 
a few similar complaints.