Basic: Terminals, consoles, and restarting Gnome

[moreponies]

Hello,

i have a couple very general questions about terminals and consoles.

I am running suse 8.1 with Gnome 1.4 as the default GUI.

When i press Ctrl+Alt+F1 i drop back out to a sort of graphical text session, sitting at the login prompt. why? and how do i start gnome back up? I have tried "startx" and "startx gnome" and it always errors out saying the X server is already running on 0,0

When i press Ctrl+Alt+F2, F3, F4, etc
I change to a wholy text based session, which are tty2, tty3, tty4, etc, i understand why this is so but my question is. . .Can i start the gnome desktop on these other terminals? and if so, how?

and as a sort of followup, why does the F1 act differently, as in the terminal session is inside a GUI. and why would pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 change anything since wouldn't i be running by default from the start on F1 or tty1?

Much thanks to anyone who can give me a short remedial lesson on this.

Thanks
Mikey

[GotAnyGrapes?]

Gnome is still running on display 0. To get back to the GUI press Ctrl+Alt+F7.

You can start xwindows on those other tty's. Here's an example:

press Ctrl+Alt+F2
login
startx -- :1

You now have two xwindows sessions running. Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to go the first, and Ctrl+Alt+F8 to go to the second.

[morpeonies]

THANKS! Gotanygrapes, as it happens i just found that reference about Ctrl+Alt+F1 in a Linux manual but i still hadn't found out if you could start the X-session on the other virtual consoles, thanks for taking the time to answer that.

PS-Do you use Gnome? Because there is another small test window called Xconsole that starts every time with gnome and references errors of some sort looks like. Just wondering if you can tell me a litle more about it?

Thanks
Mikey