Safely Shutdown a Frozen Linux System
September 17th, 2008For when everything freezes totally it’s useful to know the commands on this Free Software Magazine page.
I notice that on Fedora these keys are not captured by default but this is easily fixed using the following command as root.
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
On my system this also opens gnome-screenshot but don’t worry as the kernel still gets the keys as well. My only problem is that the /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq file gets overwritten on boot so I need to make the change permanent, if I find a solution I’ll update the post.
Update – on Fedora it’s very easy to set the sysrq parameter to 1 permanently. Just open the file /etc/sysctl.conf as root and look for the following line, changing it from 0 to 1.
# Controls the System Request debugging functionality of the kernel kernel.sysrq = 0
