Good Keyboard combos to use in Linux

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I know that in Windows to terminate a unstable service or program you do Ctrl-Alt-Del. Whats a way to do the same in linux.

ctrl+c works most of the time for me.

The experts will probably have the details, bot you can send a job to the background, or use the 'kill' command, to stop something not working.

Well, see... it depends. Pakled's control-c suggestion will work for anything you're running in a terminal. If you're doing something out in the GUI, then the keybindings will be different depending on your desktop environment/window manager of choice. And of course, whatever GUI you choose to use, you can almost certainly customize those keybindings to your own preferences.

You use (x)Ubuntu, right? Install Compiz-config and compiz fusion icon from add/remove. There's a plugin in Compiz called "crash handler" or something like that. Lets you click on an unstable/unresponsive app to kill it, and provides an easy way to set the keybinding for it. I believe there's another utility in GNOME that does the same thing, but I can't check that right now. I believe it's an icon you can add to your panel that enables you to terminate unstable programs. Ubuntu used to use control-alt-backspace to restart X entirely, landing you back at the login screen. They've changed this by default (Fuzzy knows the new key combination, something ridiculous like alt-print-f4) but you can get the old behavior back by installing the "dontzap" package and running "sudo dontzap --disable" (without the quotes).

Honestly, I never managed to run into enough instability to make it worth my time to learn how to deal with such problems. And on the few occasions Ubuntu crashed on me, it crashed hard and required a reboot anyways. Nowadays, when something is misbehaving I just open up a terminal and type "killall [insert misbehaving program here]"

If you have control you can open a terminal and say killall firefox (or whatever). This is good for things running in the background.

You can also alt-f2 and type xkill. The mouse will turn into an X and you then click the out of control window. It will die. Should work from the terminal as well.

If you are really messed up, try alt-prtscn-k. this will reset x, close all your open apps and send you back to log in. Its fast. Its like a fast restart almost.

if you are really, really messed up(alt-printscreen-k doesnt work), then try alt+sysreq REISUB typing r-e-i-s-u-b very slowly sysreq is the same as print screen normally. This will shut down all services cleanly in order... it speaks directly to the hardware, so it should always work.

Baring all that, holding the powerbutton should work.

There is a nice cheat sheet you might find useful at fosswire..

http://fosswire.com/post/2008/04/ubuntu-cheat-sheet/

I believe some of them no longer work. Control alt backspace for instance.

That's what I was looking for. There's a GNOME panel applet to trigger xkill for better convenience, and a compiz plugin to do the same.


Sure it works... you just have to enable it. That's one of my first tasks in setting up a new Ubuntu install. But Jaunty broke too many things, so I'm taking a brief hiatus to let them figure stuff out.

Guess you dont have print screen, do you?

Nope. No I don't. There are some other keyboard layout quirks on Apple hardware- no Delete key, for instance. Well, we have a key called Delete, but it's actually Backspace.

One more thing.... I often keep a login going on one or more of the virtual terminals. Ubuntu defaults to six of them. You get to them from the GUI via Ctrl/Alt/F1, up to F6. Once out of the GUI, you don't need the Ctrl key, just Alt/Fx will switch between them.

To get back to the (first) GUI, use (Ctrl/)Alt/F7. I sometimes run a second copy of X, and that goes at (Ctrl/)Alt/F8, where you'll initially find the startup log. I'm never quite sure what (Ctrl/)Alt/F9 ia all about.

Oh... and the point of it all? Sometimes I find it more convenient to "poke around" with the GUI from outside of it.

Have you tried Alt+Ctrl+Backspace?

sudo joe /etc/X11/xorg.conf

then add this:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "off"
EndSection

then save and re-start X11.

Instead of joe, you can of course use any other text editor.

Last edited by LostInEmulation on 26 Jun 2009, 9:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

Which of course means Vim.

Joe is the first thing I install on any given Linux.

Same here.

/me awaits emacs/vi war

$ su
Password:
# aptitude install emacs
Reading package lists... Done
Bulding dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
emacs emacs22{a} emacs22-bin-common{a} emacs22-common{a}
emacsen-common{a} xaw3dg{a}
0 packages upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded
Need to get 17.9MB of archives. After unpacking 62.8MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n

An editor should not take up that kind of space. For reference, vim (the full vim, not Debian's default vim-tiny) takes 1778kB (that's a k, not an M) and my entire GUI (X11 and my window manager) takes up only marginally more space than emacs would. Also, I couldn't even get all the way through the emacs tutorial before my pinky finger started to hurt.

Why use anything but the shell?

In a root shell:

(OK, so "cat" isn't (usually?) built in, but I couldn't be bothered to figure out exactly how to do it with "echo", which generally is.)

cat is provided with ubuntu.