How to gracefully reboot your Ubuntu/Debian system if all else fails | ArsGeek

There you are, staring at a crashed Gnome session, CTRL-ALT-BKSPC does nothing. ALT-CTRL-F1 won’t bring you to a terminal where you could cd to /etc/init.d and restart gdm. In short, your choices seem to be limited to holding down the power button and chancing file system corruption or nothing.

But wait! There’s two more options that you may not have known about!


Here are two ways to first try and kill just the process on your current terminal (thus allowing you to get back into your machine and at least attempt a ’shutdown -h now’ command) and if that fails, to bring your machine down in a more graceful manner than a hard shutdown.

First, we’ll try and kill all the process on your current terminal. To do this, hold down the following keys -

ALT + SysReq + k

What the heck is a SysReq key? Look for it on your PrtSc or Print Screen key. The k in this instance stands for Kill.

If that doesn’t work for you, it’s time to take drastic action. You’ll now enter a series of keystrokes that will tell your computer to do some housekeeping before shutting down.

ALT + SysReq + r

This stands for Raw keyboard mode.

ALT + SysReq + s

This syncs the disk.

ALT + SysReq + e

This terminates all processes

ALT + SysReq + i

Kill’s all processes that weren’t terminated nicely.

ALT + SysReq + u

Remounts all filesystems as read only.

ALT + SysReq + b

Reboots.

That’s a heck of a lot better than simply holding down the power button and hoping everything works out okay.

How will you ever remember all those keystrokes? There is a long held mnemonic that makes it a bit easier:

Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring - RSEIUB

You should use this method only if other methods (mentioned above) fail.


How to gracefully reboot your Ubuntu/Debian system if all else fails | ArsGeek

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice, due on 17th April 2014

Image
Canonical today announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be released on 17th April 2014, bringing a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years. “Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical. Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu. “Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubun
Read more

New Pop!_OS Update Makes (Some) Computers Faster

Image
A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based   Pop!_OS   distro could make a big impact on system performance. Pop!_OS now enables  zram  support by default — and to  quote Sytem76  themselves the feature  “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.” Pretty nice, eh? Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games. Though I’m yet to try it on Pop!_OS, zram is something I use on several devices as  Fedora enabled zram  a few years back. Though I don’t come bearing any graphs to back the enthusiasm up, it’s something I definitely  think  I feel the benefit of, even for basic computing needs. Still, it’s not just thos
Read more

Ubuntu’s New Installer is Shaping Up Nicely

Image
  Ubuntu’s been working on its   new OS installer   for a couple years, now it looks like the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’ release will finally ship it by default. The latest pending  Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds  use the reworked installer by default, and is expected to power the default install experience of the Ubuntu 23.03 beta in March. Thing is, despite the fact the installer is built using an entirely different toolkit ( Flutter ) and now leverages the Ubuntu’s  server-based  Subiquity  and  Curtin  efforts, it doesn’t look  that  different to the existing one. In fact, if no-one told you the installer was rebuilt you’d probably never tell. The new installer was available to test in previous versions of Ubuntu using a special ‘canary’ ISO, and is also  available as a Snap  app you can run (but shouldn’t) on an existing Ubuntu install. Now the Flutter-based front-end has filtered out in the official daily builds — so let’s go hands on to see how it performs! Ubuntu’s New In
Read more