Your GUI is stuck… it’s not the end of the world
You are working with your Linux system, with GUI (which is some kind of WM which works on top of X Window system) and then suddenly everything is stuck. Mouse doesn’t respond, nothing moves on the screen and it seems like there’s nothing to do except reboot. WAIT.
Reboot is dangerous. You don’t want to reboot unless the system is really stuck. Maybe it’s only the UI. There are virtual consoles in your Linux, which may help. As you can read in this howto, you can switch to virtual console using Ctrl-Alt-F# (F# is the F1…F6 keys on your keyboard). Guess what, there’s a terminal there! Now you can login, kill the bad behaved application and get back to your X using Alt-F7.
Technorati Tags: linux, X Window, reboot, virtual console
