[SATLUG] Re: Hung Up X-Session

[Eric Hobbs]

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 23:42, Matt wrote:
> To kill an X session that is hung:
> 
> Ctrl-Alt-Bksp  (from that term window.. )
> 
> THat will cause X to shutdown and reload just that terminal window.
> 
> If you have used the frozen terminal to start another X session in
> another terminal (e.g you ran startx -- :1 from a console window in the
> current session that froze) then you will lose both sessions.
[cut]

Here's a word of warning to folks with certain models of ECS
motherboards...

I have an ECS K7S7A board (I think that's the correct model number), and
I found that pressing Ctrl-Alt-Bksp forcibly powers off the machine!  I
have another, slightly older ECS board, but it doesn't do this.

I did not see a BIOS setting to change this key combination.  A quick
Google search seems to confirm the behavior that I'm seeing.  I gotta
wonder who was the genius that came up with that "feature".  They must
not be a Linux user...

But, yes, on  99.9% of the hardware out there, Ctrl-Alt-Bksp will kill
your X session.  If you can't switch to a different console and kill the
X session, the alternative is to secure shell into the box with the hung
X session and kill the process remotely.

--Eric