☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

My sister, experience some programs running with wine (Windows Emulator) to crash on her Ubuntu 11.10.
As she is quite new with Linux, she has no idea about the existence of CTRL ALT BACKSPACE key combination to restart a hanged GNOME, KDE by directly killing the Xorg server.

I felt obliged to explain her it is better to use CTRL ALT BACKSPACE X kill switch instead of restarting the whole Linux kernel (which basiclly is working) and that it is just the display keeping blacnk.

Pressing the would kill Xorg and therefore all applicatins previously running on top of it will die. In Ubuntu Xorg is configured to run via gdm, so once killed it will automatically reload the GDM (Gnome Display Manager).

I was about to explain her that its better she use CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE instead of restarting the whole system but suddenly I realized this is not working.

In UBUNTU 11.10 and I guess in all UBUNTU's after 9.04 CTRL ALT BACKSPACE is substituted with the key switch combination ALT PRINTSCREEN K, I've explained her about that.

This change is actually a change implied by most Linux distributions nowdas and is some kind of change in Xorg newer versions…
To enable back the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE , I've issued cmd:

stanimira@ubuntu~:$ echo' setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp' >> ~/.xinitrc


An alternative way to set setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp to run on Ubuntu user login is by setting it as a startup application using;

stanimira@ubuntu:~$ gnome-session-properties


Press the Add button and type in the box to appear;
Name: setxkbmap
Command: setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
Comment: setxkbmap


Reverting the Xserver kill switch back to the classical Ctrl+Alt+Backspace should also be running fine on older Ubuntu Linuces – 11.04, 10.10, 10.04 etc.