Keystroke to Restart X/Windows in Ubuntu 10.04 - Lucid 2

Posted by JD 05/20/2010 at 11:33

Like many people, I recently updated my main desktop Ubuntu installation to 10.04, Lucid Lynx. As a long time Linux user, we’re used to some special keystrokes to force the system to do things. Keystrokes like:

  • Reboot – {cntl}-{alt}-{del}
  • Restart X/Windows – {cntl}-{alt}-{backspace}

The Solution

In Ubuntu 10.04, the old restart X/windows keystroke doesn’t work. That keystroke has been around since the beginning of X/Windows on i386 hardware. I know because I’ve been using it since 1993-ish. I believe Canonical/Ubuntu changed it from a point of safety for new users. This article describes different ways to get the older behavior based on whether you’re running Gnome, KDE or just want a shell method. If you know me, you know I went with the shell solution.

I switched to one of the 6 existing xterms on my desktop and pasted:
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

and then added those lines to my ~/.xinitrc .

Easy peasy.

I’ve since learned that this behavior actually changed in an earlier release, but since I didn’t use that release except under a VM, I never dealt with the missing keystroke issue. I can see where any user who had their desktop disappear would be freaked out, so the choice to have this disabled by default seems very reasonable to me. No complaints.

Trackbacks

Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
https://blog.jdpfu.com/trackbacks?article_id=647

  1. David L 08/13/2010 at 14:35

    Sweet. You are awesome, dude.

  2. B.J. Herbison 12/27/2010 at 19:25

    I also discovered you can control this feature from System/Preferences/Keyboard…/Layouts/Options…/Key Sequence to kill the X server.