Downloaded and installed 9.10 yesterday and what do you know, someone decided to take away Ctrl-Alt-Backspace — or what I call “Three Finger Salute for Linux”. Whhhaaattt!!!!
How the heck are you supposed to kill and restart X without that…..A coworker suggested Alt-PrintScreen-K, but that just restarts GDM, not really useful when X decides to go south. Damit!!
The reason given on Ubuntu wiki is that “This is due to the fact that DontZap is no longer an option in the X server and has become an option in XKB instead.”
Well, fear not, whoever disabled it also created a easy way to reenable it again. Here is what you do:
- In Gnome (Ubuntu):
* Get to the System->Preferences->Keyboard menu.
* Select the "Layouts" tab and click on the "Layout Options" button.
* Then select "Key sequence to kill the X server" and enable "Control + Alt + Backspace". - In KDE (Kubuntu):
* Launch "systemsettings"
* Select "Regional & Language".
* Select "Keyboard Layout".
* Click on "Enable keyboard layouts" (in the Layout tab).
* Select the "Advanced" tab. Then select "Key sequence to kill the X server" and enable "Control + Alt + Backspace". - Using Command-Line:
You can type the following command to enable Zapping immediately.
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bkspIf you're happy with the new behaviour you can add that command to your ~/.xinitrc in order to make the change permanent.
- Using HAL:
You can add the following line in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-x11-input.fdi (inside the <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys"> section):
<merge key="input.xkb.options" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp</merge>
One response to “Fix Ctrl-Alt-Backspace problem with Ubuntu 9.10+”
Thanks for this. Couldn't figure out why cntrl-alt-backspace wasn't working.