Regardless of what operating system, desktop environment or computer architecture you’re using, your computer is at one point or another going to freeze up on you. It might be due to a single application going crazy, causing your processor to eat electricity and piss heat even more so than before, or it could just be because you’re using Windows. Regardless of why it dies on you, it can cause even the most doped up valium user to go berserk. Luckily, Linux provides you with a way to get out of most of these situations without having to restart your entire computer.

Built into the X.Org implementation of the X Window System is a shortcut that allows you to restart the window system, kill all the processes that you had running, and essentially throwing you back to the login screen - without having to reboot the entire computer. It’s by no means ideal, and it probably won’t make you any less angry when your computer stops working for no apparent reason, but at least it’s better than having to sit through a 1 minute reboot.

However, it seems a lot of butterfingered (you have a dirty mind!) idiots manage to accidentally restart X by using this shortcut, so in version 1.6 of X.Org Server this is disabled by default. Something that really annoyed the shit out of me before I figured out how to “fix” it.

There 2 fairly painless ways to do it. If you’re running Ubuntu, you can install and disable the dontzap package, and if you’re running something else - you can go in an edit xorg.conf manually. Don’t worry, I’ll take you through it.

Dontzap - the Ubuntu way

This couldn’t be easier. Just open up the terminal and type in the following:

sudo apt-get install dontzap

Followed by:

sudo dontzap --disable

Done! That’s all there is to it. Now you can go back to accidentally pressing Ctr + Alt + Backspace while working on your oh so important documents, or whatever it is you kids are doing these days.

Manually editing xorg.conf

This really isn’t all that difficult either. All you have to do is open up/etc/X11/xorg.conf as root, and adding a few rows of text.

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now add this somewhere in the file:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option          "DontZap"               "false"
EndSection

And that’s all there is to it! I hope this has helped you. I sure know how annoying it is when some functionality that you’ve grown used to is taken away from you. I guess this is just one of those moments when the developers have decided that it’s more important to avoid having hundreds of retards losing their data than it is to let the user have full control of his or her machine. Still, when the fix is this simple, I don’t really care.

However, OpenSuse has a pretty neat way of solving this. Basically you just have to press Ctr + Alt + Backspace twice to restart X. That way you hopefully won’t do it by accident. With a little luck that patch may become standard in a lot of distributions.