Comment 15 for bug 367318

I'm sorry to have been rude if I was, but I'm not an ubuntu developer so I really don't know squat about packaging and whatnot. I do, however, have common sense as well as a knack for experimentation.

Cons.saver makes use of vcsa device to do its job, and if it lacks perms it fails to do the C-o magic screen flip.

Empirical evidence obtained by experimentation solidly confirms this as the cause of the problem, both on ubuntu and on gentoo. Flipping-flopping cons.saver from rwxr-xr-x root root to rwxr-sr-x root tty and back again reliably supresses and restores the errant behavior.

Upstream fixes are almost certainly useless for resolving this bug, as device permissions are ostensibly the responsibility of downstream administrators, with sane defaults probably provided by the distros making use of the mc package.

Which would indicate that the appropriate level to have this thing fixed would be by an ubuntu-specific tweak to the perms of cons.saver on installation of mc.