Tagged and Bagged: Linux, podcast
I’ve tried this recently and it does actually work. Thanks to Ed Labonte’s mention of this trick in his podcast The Linux Install Podcast. If you have a computer that has become unresponsive, you can make it reboot if you have to without hitting the power switch by doing the following:
Hold down the “ALT” key and the “Print Screen|SysReq” key. Then, type, ensuring that you definitely type the right letters distinctly. The letters you type, while still holding down those two keys, is “R” “E” “I” “S” “U” “B”. This should give your system back to you.
Good luck with that.
I tell you, if that would work for a Sun system, that would be the bomb. Granted, I have only had a couple of Sun servers lock up like that, but I really don’t like the “power off and pray” method of rebooting. But, I have only had Sun servers lock up like that if /tmp fills up. Well, actually, I only knew that for a fact with a 210 I worked on in England. I only assumed that was what happened with a 2900 here a few weeks ago.
I’m sure that Sun has a super secret method of going down to a basic (e(p))rom-stored command of some sort. I wonder if they’d share!
I wish that I’d have known of that command before I got the NVidia card for this computer. After all the hard locks trying to use 3D acceleration with the ATI card, that command would have been nice to know (I just used it on a frozen Mandriva Alpha 2 box, though).
Well I prefer the power button. Haven’t got three hands, you know
I do too, but I also want to keep from waiting for a fsck or scandisk to run through. Of course, with modern journaled filesystems, like NTFS, Reiser, or EXT3, the danger is lower of filesystem corruption. Since I’ve been playing around with Mandriva’s latest alpha (and, yes, Cooker is still the most active and volatile development branch of any distro I’ve used), I’ve had to use this command to release my machine to me twice so far (and since I couldn’t get KDE 4 to boot, I wiped it off and tried the same with Kubuntu).
I’ll have to give that a whirl sometime. Thanks for the heads up!