CTRL – ALT – Backspace

Here’s a little tip for users that upgrade from Fedora 10 to Rawhide and like to make use of the CTRL – ALT – Backspace combo.

Due to a change in Xorg, the combination doesn’t work by default anymore. You have to override it manually by adding the following lines to your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “DontZap” “off”
EndSection

Here’s the corresponding manual section:

Option “DontZap”  “boolean”

This disallows the use of the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace sequence.  That sequence is normally used to terminate the Xorg server.  When this option  is  enabled (as per default),  that  key sequence has no special meaning.
Default: on.

I guess this also applies to other distributions which are using Xorg 1.6.

CC BY-SA 4.0 CTRL – ALT – Backspace by Eelko Berkenpies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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