Mike, you're assuming too much. Not every Linux distribution defaults to
having a VT on console 2. I've used some that will show a blank screen there.
That said ... Michael, how do you know you were "locked out"? SOME key
combination should have gotten you back to the VT you were on (if you were
in X, it too runs on a VT). Did you try ALT-F1 through ALT-F9, all to no
avail? (The CRTL-ALT-F* combinations are needed only in an X screen.) If you
did all of this, still with no success, you have a more serious problem than
what Mike and I have assumed, and you might want to describe your system
(hardware and software) in a bit more detail so someone might make suggestions.
To better understand what's going on, look in /etc/inittab and find out what
runlevel your system defaults to (look for the line with the work
"initdefault"). Then look for lines that have that number in the second
field (fields are separated by colons in this file) to see what processes
run at the default runlevel. Some will be lines like this:
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
The number in the "tty" entry at the end tells you which VT is running the
process. "getty" (or a variant like "agetty" or "mgetty") tells you that the
VT runs a login process; other things can run on VTs, but unless you have a
truly unusual setup, you're not likely to encounter them ...
... with one exception: xdm. This is the process that provides login
capabilities directly into X.
Oh, to answer your actual question ... NO. Nobody -- beginner or not --
should enter a command without knowing what it does ... especially someone
working as root (even "rm -rf /*" won't wreck a system unless run by root).
At 11:50 AM 1/25/00 -0500, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 10:38:13AM -0600, Mike Miller wrote:
>> I did something stupid last night, I pressed ctrl-alt-F2 and totally
>> locked up the machine. Actually it may not have been locked up,
>> but I was locked out. The monitor went blank and the keyboard
>> dead. Even the caps lock led was dead ! The only way I could
>> recover was a hardware reset. Why did I do it? I mis-remembered
>> something I'd read about switching from X to console.
>
> That should have put you on Console 2. You should have had
>a login prompt there. Don't know why you would have just died. From
>there <Alt><Fn> or <Cntrl><Alt><Fn> should take you to the various
>virtual consoles with F1 being the first console. One of them (typically
>F7 if you have 6 virtual consoles set up) should dump you back in X.
>
>> The question? Is there a list of commands that should never be
>> issued by uninformed newbies?
>
> Things like...
>
> rm -rf /
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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