How to recover when the Desktop Freezes and gives no response

[pradeeprajkumar]

In fedora 15 Bugs occurs in a high rate and many times the desktop freezes and gives no response to keyboard and mouse clicks.
In windows systems they made a failsafe for this kind of problems, like pressing
ctrl+alt+del
will give task manager and we can end the processes causing the windows explorer to malfunction.Like the same way is there any hot keys available in linux machines so that I can revert at the times of crisis and kill those trouble causing processes ?

[Jonathan183]

ctrl+alt+f1 or ctrl+alt+f2 ... ctrl+alt+f6 should give a virtual terminal where you can login and kill any process including X if required

[devils casper]

As Jonathan suggested, pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 to F6 switches to virtual terminal and you can kill any process or Ctrl+Alt+Back to end GUI session.
If Keyboard and mouse don't respond, you won't be able to switch to virtual terminals and kill any process. Post your machine's specs here.

[Irithori]

ssh from another machine should also work.
Or you go old style and setup a terminal via serial port with e.g. agetty(: alternative getty - Linux man page

[pradeeprajkumar]

@casper:
My machine configuration:
Fedora
Release 15
Kernel Linux 2.6.40.3-0.fc15.i686.PAE
Gnome 3.0.1
Hardware
Memory 2.0GiB
Processor 0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.00GHz
Processor 1: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.00GHz
Hard disk size: 160GiB
Available Disk space: 49.0GiB

[jonniemuk]

I usually get into that problem but switch to the virtual terminals via 'Ctrl + Alt +F2', is what i do so i proceed to work in the terminal. if i want to get back to the GUI i save my work and run a 'shutdown -r now'.