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up vote 13 down vote favorite

I've launched into X using startx, but now can't shutdown my pi, as I have no mouse, and I can't seem to access anything with the keyboard alone. What can I do?

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Which OS do you have? – finnw Jun 21 '12 at 22:49
1  
@finnw The recommended Debian – Tom Medley Jun 22 '12 at 8:52

4 Answers

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1.

This will switch you to a different tty. After logging in on this you can run commands as normal

Any F key under 6 will do.

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This switched out to the console running X, I could then terminate X with ctrl-c and shutdown the machine. – Tom Medley Jun 20 '12 at 9:41
@TomMedley Glad I could help. – Jivings♦ Jun 20 '12 at 10:02
This is a bit of a sledge hammer solution I think. – Skizz Sep 7 '12 at 9:15
@Skizz It's the only solution that will work in any session. – Jivings♦ Sep 7 '12 at 14:10
up vote 1 down vote

Try Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

This will kill the running X server.

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This doesn't work by default on recent versions of X. – Jivings♦ Jun 20 '12 at 7:25
I wasn't sure to be honest! – Alex Chamberlain Jun 20 '12 at 8:10
No harm done. It's still useful to know. Some Window Managers re-enable it. – Jivings♦ Jun 20 '12 at 8:38
up vote 1 down vote

Pressing ctrl-esc brings up the 'start' menu (for want of a better word) and then you can use the arrow keys to select 'logout'.

Which is the same as Windows - if you've not got a Windows key then ctrl-esc does the same thing (OK, a bit off topic but thought I'd make sure everyone understodd I wasn't just thinking it was Windows and that it also works on the default Pi destkop).

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However, this is dependant on the display manager, whereas my solution will work in any X session. – Jivings♦ Sep 7 '12 at 14:09
up vote 0 down vote

Why not stop it with sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop

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I doubt that that would be possible, unless there was a terminal window open, and currently focused when the mouse was removed. – bearbin Sep 17 '12 at 18:19
If there is no window manager, decorator, etc. it means that startx didn't launch lightdm. Then lightdm status is not set as started/running and thus it can't be stopped with sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop – Avio Sep 27 '12 at 20:51

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