This has always upset me and I finallly found a solution to when X freezes and you can't ctrl-alt-backspace. All you need to do is ssh in from another machine, kill X and restart X using startx, -- no need to reboot --.

I have killed X before but it just leaves the screen foobar'd and I thought that all that there is left to do is reboot, however by issuing a startx everyhting is fixed and you can once again use your machine.

1) find the pid of your X server:
ps -e | grep X

2) kill X
su
kill -9 PID_FROM_ABOVE

3) restart X
startx &

Hope other poeple find this,
it took me 4-ever to figure this out.

cludwin

Or... "kill -9 $(pidof X)"

1 members found this post helpful.

or
killall X

--Shade

Hi folks,

FedoraCore3
KDE deskop

I'm searching around for 'restart X' without logout and relogin

[Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Back Space]
does not work here. It logout and I have to relogin

$ ps -e | grep X
5889 ? 00:00:12 X

su
# kill -9 5889
also logout

# killall X
also logout

$ kill -9 $5889
bash: kill: (889) - No such process
(It is strange here the number '5' missing)

Advice will be appreciated. TIA

B.R.
satimis

There shouldn't be a way to do this. Think about it. Wouldn't it be a big security flaw if you didn't have to login when X started?

Hi WRSpithead,

X window (KDE desktop) is already running. Because I made some changes on a config file it required restarting X window to take effect.

IIRC on Redhat [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Back Space] will do the job, without logout and relogin. But it did not work on my FC3 box.

B.R.
satimis

Hi people..

Anyone tried Fedora Core 4 ?? There is no switching to text mode and back to graphical with Ctrl+Alt+F1 F7 etc.. can anyone help me

I reported this problem as a bug during FC4 testing, but was promptly told that it wasn't, but it still doesn't work properly.

You can skip the logout part and login in a new parallell X session instead. A Howto for this on Ubuntu can be found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4211618

Hopefully you can use the same principles on your system.

Cheers!

Hi people,
I've had the same issue, and tried the top (kill X then restart it) in my ubuntu 10.04 w. KDE 4, and got the same problems - logged out etc. However I don't need to restart X that often, so now instead of loggin in to KDE in the first place I start with a plain console login and then start X - then the original solution seems to work, at least with GNOME.

Best, Michael.