This is obviously a stupid question. I am coding in Eclipse both on Mac and Linux, but I mixed up and used the Mac shortcut to window tabbing (Ctrl-Cmd-F6), but I was using the Linux on uni and screen went black. I've done this before, but this time I can't get back to my desktop. Ctrl-Alt F1-F6 gives me different terminals, F7 gives me a black screen and F8 a blinking underscore in the top left corner. Shouldn't my session have been somewhere in F1-F6 and is it lost?
No, on the Linux terminal, Ctrl-Alt-F? is the same as Alt-F?, as far as I know.
Chris Jester-Young
2008-09-23 10:53:29
+2
A:
Ctrl-Alt-F7 should work perhaps your X has crashed?
I just did what you did and F7 got it back for me, saying that before I remember X crashing and I had the same black screen
Paul Whelan
2008-09-23 10:54:22
That may be, but the vt that gets assigned to a local X session is distribution-dependent.
Chris Jester-Young
2008-09-23 10:55:33
The fact that Ctrl-Alt-F7 doesn't give him a blinking cursor indicates that is the VT assigned to X. Is it possible a blank screen-saver has kicked in? Hit a few keys when you are in VT7.
Jim
2008-09-23 10:58:25
A:
ctrl-alt-f7 only gets me back to whatever terminal i had before getting the black screen after pressing ctrl-alt-f7 again. f9-f12 didn't seem to do anything either. And please don't vote this down. I'm trying to write an OS here, but it's rather hard without my desktop. And the problem occured because of the shortcut in eclipse ^
Vargen
2008-09-23 11:00:43
+1
A:
Looks like X crashed. To check, you could log in on one of the terminals (on Ctrl+F1 etc.) and check that the "X" process is still running.
I've had the same happen to me recently, and found the SIGSEGV and backtrace later in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Curse your graphics driver vendor (usually) and then reboot.
oliver
2008-09-23 11:11:41
+3
A:
X is probably still running on F7, your display driver (or something else) is just misbehaving. You might be able to trick it into coming back on by going to F7 and blindly opening a terminal and playing with xset ($ xset dpms force on). Or you can ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X and GDM should restart it.
Try seeing if you can repeat the problem and then file a bug report (or let the lab admin know if it isn't your computer). It probably has something to do with your distro's kernel configuration/patching. I've had this happen before on Ubuntu but not any other distros (I've used many), which is why I am assuming it might be distro-specific issue. Probably the unintended consequences of some kernel patching.
It was a really annoying bug, so i'm not going to recreate it today at least:P Maybe i'll do it tomorrow. Thanks for a nice answer.
Vargen
2008-09-23 11:32:39
+1
A:
The ctrl+alt+Fx (x=1..6) key combinations often allow you to have up to 6 concurrent terminal sessions on the console. Usually one is setup to use X windows, and differs from distribution to distribution. Typically its on Ctrl+Alt+F7.
http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/l/blnewbie5_1.htm
Some distributions of Linux allow you to kill the X Windows session with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace at which point the operating system will attempt to restart it.
Jim Burger
2008-09-23 11:18:39
A:
We're running gnome on Red Hat 5. ps axu in one of the other terminals showed some of the processes still running. Probably something with the display drivers then. Did ctrl-alt-backspace and restarted it. Thanks for the help.
Vargen
2008-09-23 11:23:33
A:
In the future, you can go into a terminal and type:
init 3
To bring the system into text mode, and:
init 5
To return the system to X mode. The nice thing about doing it that way is that everything should be shut down and restarted cleanly.
duffbeer703
2008-09-23 18:28:28