Comment 8 for bug 12647

(In reply to comment #4)
> Eugenia, does Alt+SysRq+R fix this?

It "fixes" it for me, to the point of being able to switch consoles (though I
still can't talk to whiptail); this is how I've continued with live CD testing
while things have been broken in the daily live CDs.

You should be able to reproduce this easily with the (broken) live CD of
20050210, or by otherwise causing the X server to fail to start.

Interestingly, strace seems to show whiptail blocked writing to tty7.