Arch Linux

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

How do I regain control of my system when some process blacked the scr

screen

Specifically this is happening with a couple games in Wine, particularly Civilization 5 and Diablo 2. When they exit, I get a black screen with my normal KDE cursor. I can't use my keyboard shortcuts for changing workspaces. My first thought was to go to another virtual terminal, log in, and terminate the process, but as far as I can tell there aren't any processes from the game still running, yet my screen remains blacked out.

My only solution is to reboot. Is there some other way I can regain control?

DIDI2002

Member

Registered: 2009-08-06

Posts: 66

Re: How do I regain control of my system when some process blacked the scr

Killing / restarting X would at least save you from rebooting (killall Xorg).
Maybe there's still something wine-related in (h)top? Diablo 2 worked on my Gnome desktop, but I remember I always had to reset the resolution from 640x480 with xrandr

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

Re: How do I regain control of my system when some process blacked the scr

You can use the magic sysrq key.
First you gotta enable it by setting kernel.sysrq = 1 in /etc/sysctl.conf (or via echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq).
Then you can use Alt+SysRQ+K to kill all processes in the current virtual terminal. If the X server crashed you first might have to grab control over keyboard/mouse from X by pressing Alt+SysRQ+R.
If that doesn't work for you it's still better to perform a software reboot by "raising the elephant" (Alt+SysRQ+ R(aising) -> E(lephants) -> I(s) -> S(o) -> U(tterly) -> B(oring)) than to reboot the pc by pressing the reboot button.

Last edited by demian (2010-10-01 01:11:11)

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,772

Re: How do I regain control of my system when some process blacked the scr

My favorite method is to log in via ssh and do it remotely.

Also, I am an engineer and always have my trusty HP50g calculator.  I start up a terminal program on it, plug it into a USB port, and voilà! I have an instant external terminal as a console (This does require minor changes to /etc/inittab.)  This scores very high on the geek scale.

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Rad3k

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 36

Re: How do I regain control of my system when some process blacked the scr

If killing the game doesn't work, I would go for restarting X. If you start your login manager via inittab, you can restart X by switching runlevels - just issue (as root) "telinit 3" and then "telinit 5" to go back to graphical login.