Likely fixed now, as it works for me – I tried what you wrote, and indeed, can reproduce it, in that you are left (or at least I am, because of use of the X -novtswitch command option) on an essentially empty vt7 (with just some of the old log messages from the prior session on the first/top half of the display screen), but from there an Alt-F1-6 takes you to a responsive console login … additionally, depending upon how many X sessions you were running, the subsequent vts after that are as described (blank, or near blank), and with vt10 showing dmesg boot stuff.
Right now, the most annoying bug I’m facing is if I logout of the second X session, the first X session on vt7 goes blank and requires you to hit Alt-F7 to switch back …(after which everything is fine again) … one person is saying that they are experiencing complete crashes of the X on vt7 (see comment #26:Bug #976124 “lightdm multiseat: no login possible” : Bugs : lightdm package : Ubuntu … unfortunately that same commenter is actually complaining about this within the thread dedicated to another issue/bug (missing password field)). In any regard, I have not experienced such a crashing occurrence as he describes, rather, just the blanked vt7 whose X session is still quite alive. … I am hopeful that this issue might soon see a resolution: [LightDM] systemd cooperation](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/lightdm/2012-November/000331.html)
oops, that’s only part of it – every boot the vt7 X session goes blank right upon the initialization of the second X session on vt8, so you have to Alt-F7 to bring the greeter screen back up on the X Display on vt7
Interestingly, I discovered by accident that this doesn’t apply to the Pantheon greeter (or, at least, the very early build that I have installed):
This past week I updated to lightdm v1.6 – I was looking forward to that as I was under the impression a potential fix to the two annoyances/bugs, that I had mentioned above (post 21 and 22), had been introduced and had not yet been picked up by the v1.4 branch that I had been running. Initially after the update it appeared like that was the case as vt7 login (with the default gtk greeter) remained up when I booted … however, turning on the monitors for the second X Session revealed that not all was well as they lay dormant. It took a couple of minutes of log file examination etc. to see what was up and to discover that the upgrade to v1.6 had created a brand new lightdm.conf file – grrrr, not cool behaviour >:(.
Anyway, I restored a backup copy of lightdm.conf and rebooted. However, I mistakenly provided a copy which I had used specifically when testing the various greeters out several months back (I guess I had forgot to delete it and I just grabbed the most recent, by date, backup copy in the folder). The result was that Pantheon was configed as the login greeter – and it was then that I discovered that, using pantheon, vt7 does not go blank when vt8 is initialized.
Yet, upon further testing, switching back to the gtk greeter results in the blanking of vt7 behaviour.
Interesting that the very early build of the pantheon greeter that I have installed should produce the desired result yet the other greeters fail. Not sure why.
its pretty cool, though, I’m not sure where or how one selects the background image(s) (for me, the background(s) is/are currently just black) – it might be specific to a Ubuntu/Debian/elementary way of setting themes … I don’t know (there is no greeter.conf file like there is for the other greeter types i.e. webkit, gtk, qt …)
I don’t recall for sure whether I had problems installing the package, but I tend to think I did – it hails from the launchpad universe, and, IIRC, I used alien to convert the debs to rpm, but had to do that for a number of dependencies specific to the Ubuntuverse
the build I have is buggy … definitely not production ready … I’d call it a preview edition
I am curious about what the quality would be like now (might grab a current build and see if I can get it to install, though, I suspect that dependencies will be a big issue) and whether or not I can figure out how to get the background splash image(s) to work
On a whim, I copied the lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf file and renamed it lightdm-pantheon-greeter.conf … the result was that, on reboot, vt7 blanked when switching over to vt8 ! However, no background image (still black), so it doesn’t look like this little trick will work for pantheon … Also, it looks like a black background is the default setting for lightdm greeters (http://www.mattfischer.com/blog/?p=5) … removing this psuedo pantheon-greeter.conf file resulted in vt7 not being blanked when vt8 is initialized … so interesting clue there in regards to that bug.
On a whim, I tested gtk-greeter next, and temporarily removed its conf file … the result still yielded vt7 being blanked when vt8 initialized … oh, and the background was now black
Enough messing around for now … though (compulsions may see it through that) I may try playing with a new build of pantheon later.
