I'm not sure what I pressed to mess this up. I was on tty1, but it doesn't look like I'm on tty1 anymore. When I press any key on the terminal it just prints weird letters. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 through F7 also just prints characters.
Multiple times I tried typing in reset and [Enter] into the terminal, but it isn't fixing the problem. I tried typing Ctrl-q then reset, but still just crazy characters.
I'm pretty sure the kernel is still running correctly because, before this happened, I started a very large file transfer from a host computer to this computer. The files still appear to be copying correctly from the host computer.
https://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l169/extralifestar/bad_term.png
Anyway to restore a system like this?
try Ctrl+Alt+F2 and see if that works for what you're doing. Sometimes it appears like the x-session is using tty1 for some things. so see if you can just do it on 2. or just type in your username and password and after it logs in it should clear all that text on tty1.