Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Magic SysRq Key

My netbook hangs about once a day. I can now reboot it more easily, thanks to the magic SysRq key.

I'm not sure why it hangs, and I'm not very worried about it. Netbook releases are new, and I remember the same kinds of problems when Linux notebooks were new. I had one laptop that worked perfectly except for sound, the mouse, and networking. :-) The next release fixed all those. (Even now, I have a pair of old notebooks running Jaunty Jackalope because Karmic Koala won't run their fans. They overheat and shut themselves off within minutes.)
I even remember the problems when Unix PCs were new. I was in Dave Barach's living room, in 1983, when he got a call from our Maryland office, which had just received the editor Dave had sent them for our as-yet-unreleased PC/IX product, done under contract to IBM, which was to run on stock IBM PC/XTs.
I could only hear Dave's side of the conversation.
What do you mean, "The color's wrong"? What do you mean, "color"?
We'd never seen a PC with a color monitor. Weren't all displays monochromatic? Once we found out how they worked, Dave fixed the problem.
I am, however, discomfitted by having to power-cycle a box -- I worry about unsynced disks and stuff. Luckily, some neuron fired and I remembered the magic SysRq key. I have had to use it so little, over the years, that I didn't remember any details, but Wikipedia came to my rescue. It does the trick, and lets me do a soft re-boot from my keyboard.

(My keyboard doesn't actually have a key labelled "SysRq," but Alt-"Print Scrn"-k works just as well.)

No muss, no fuss, no bad blocks. Magic.

Thrupence and sixpence every day.

3 comments:

jed said...

Alt-"Print Scrn"-k ?

One would think you were using Emacs.

FWIW, I've never had SysRq work. Even back when I was runing RH8 or something like that. I do recall something about how it's disabled in Ubuntu, and I haven't ever gotten around to whatever it is I'm supposed to do to make sure it's enabled. But then, once I was reminded that not all is sweetness and light in the world of OpenGL drivers, and turned off the screensavers that use it, I haven't had a hang. (Knock on silicon)

Was something on /. a while back about Lenovo (?) getting rid of the SysRq key. So I guess having an Emacsian chord is handy.

generic propecia said...

Great site,this information really helped me , I really appreciate it.Thanks a lot for a bunch of good tips. I look forward to reading more on the topic in the future. Keep up the good work! This blog is going to be great resource. Love reading it.
nice tip

pharmacy said...

Dude I have to say I'm so glad to find your blog, even though I did it by a fluke. The information posted here is interesting and entertaining. In short, a really nice blog.