If you’re like most people, you probably restart your computer at least once a day. But if you’re using Linux, that habit can be a bit more complicated than usual. On Linux, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is the key to restarting X Windows. But if you accidentally hit that key while your computer is running, it will just close the X Window System (or whatever application is currently in the foreground). That’s not ideal if you need to keep working in X Windows. So how do you disable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace from restarting X Windows on Linux? There are a few different ways to do this, but the easiest way is to add an entry to your startup script. To do that, open a terminal window and type: sudo nano /etc/rc.local #!/bin/sh … # Disable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace from Restarting X Windows on Linux echo “disable_ctrl_alt_backspace=1” » /etc/rc.local ..
Turns out it’s extremely simple to do, although I’m not necessarily recommending that you do this… it’s more for informational purposes. (while Linux might be rock-solid, I’ve had more than my share of crashing in Gnome, so the shortcut key is useful)
Disable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
The first thing you’d probably want to do is make a backup of the xorg.conf file, which you can do with this command:
Then you can edit the xorg.conf file by using Alt+F2 to open up the Run dialog and using the following command:
Now go to the bottom of the file and look for a section called “ServerFlags”, which might not exist. If the section does not exist, add this to the bottom of the file:
If that section does exist, then just add in the option line:
You’ll have to restart X again, the easiest way is ironically by using Ctrl+Alt+Backspace… but at that point the shortcut key won’t be active anymore.
If you somehow managed to totally screw up your system by making this change, you can copy the xorg.conf.orig file back to xorg.conf to switch back to the original configuration.
