Arch Linux

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Can I tell Xorg not to intercept certain keystrokes?

I've experienced several Xorg lockups recently, and the rebooting is getting extremely annoying - I shouldn't be forced to reboot because one application is blocking my input, when the rest of the OS is working fine.

So I'm wondering - can I configure Xorg to not intercept ctrl-alt-F* keystrokes, so that when Xorg locks up I can switch to a virtual terminal and kill it? Or would that not work? Is there some other way I could avoid getting locked out of my system, without having to resort to SSH?

robertp

Member

From: Warszawa, Poland

Registered: 2007-09-11

Posts: 123

Re: Can I tell Xorg not to intercept certain keystrokes?

You can disable interception of some keystrokes in xorg.conf file. Yet your case is strange since Xorg doesn't intercept Ctrl+Alt+F* keystrokes by default.

Procyon

Member

Registered: 2008-05-07

Posts: 1,819

Re: Can I tell Xorg not to intercept certain keystrokes?

ctrl+alt+F* are Xorg commands. Surely they work when Xorg isn't locked up?

I have had a hard lock once with gifview. I don't know of a way to fix it when it has happened, but I experimented with it by running a new Xorg and a timed shutdown of it. So Xorg :1 & (sleep 15; kill %%) & (sleep 1; DISPLAY=:1 COMMAND) &. Don't know if this is a working command but you get the idea.

(And as for my experiment, I don't remember what happened but I found out nothing.)