What keypress will take me to tty13?

Trying out Ubuntu Intrepid, I have discovered that RightAlt+F1 doesn't take me to tty13.

I've exhaustively tried every option presented to me in dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, the best I've been able to manage thus far has been to have both Alt keys behave the same (LeftAlt+F1 and RightAlt+F1 both going to tty1).

Please note that using GNU screen is not considered a valid response to the question - this is specifically about how to get the keyboard to behave properly with multiple consoles under Ubuntu. The crazy thing is that every other distro I've tried just handles this correctly, including Debian Lenny.

After a lot of attempts to fix this various ways, I finally figured out how to use dumpkeys and loadkeys to modify the kernel's "keyboard translation table". Here are the loadkeys strings to set RightAlt+F1 through RightAlt+F12 to their respective offsets from tty12:

altgr   keycode  59 = Console_13
altgr   keycode  60 = Console_14
altgr   keycode  61 = Console_15
altgr   keycode  62 = Console_16
altgr   keycode  63 = Console_17
altgr   keycode  64 = Console_18
altgr   keycode  65 = Console_19
altgr   keycode  66 = Console_20
altgr   keycode  67 = Console_21
altgr   keycode  68 = Console_22
altgr   keycode  87 = Console_23
altgr   keycode  88 = Console_24

Why Ubuntu doesn't include this in the default setup remains a mystery. :)

On most systems, if you are at a text console, you can use Alt + the arrow keys to move to next and previous console.

In Debian, I would just edit /etc/inittab, but Ubuntu uses Upstart.

Apparently, you're supposed to edit /etc/default/console-setup and set the ACTIVE_CONSOLES variable to be /dev/tty[1-13] in your case.

Before changing this, Right-Alt + Ctrl + F1 would bring me to tty1. Now, I just get a blank screen that I can't do anything on. I also had to manually copy the file /etc/event.d/tty1 to /etc/event.d/tty13 and change the settings inside appropriately.

I can't seem to get it to work.

shrug