Restart X shortcut for Ubuntu?

Sometimes in you find yourself in the middle of a graphical meltdown, all of a sudden the restart X shortcut for Ubuntu is your best friend! Otherwise you find yourself trying to drop out of graphical mode into a terminal user. Or heading straight for the power button!

So, what is the restart X shortcut for Ubuntu?

For a long time the restart X shortcut was:

This helped many people out of a bad spot. Graphic capabilities were limited in them days and hang ups were more common. Hardware and Linux distributions have improved since and become more stable since then.

Since Ubuntu 10.04 this was changed to the lesser known shortcut:

 This is confirmed from 10.04 all the way up to 11.10. You can also copy/type this into a terminal:

LightDM was only introduced in Ubuntu 11.10, prior to this GDM was used……

 

I think that covers possible variations of restarting X from 10.04 through to 11.10….. let me know if I’ve missed some.

For those wanting some more info on what exactly X is, here’s the  wiki link.

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  • A Tiu

    Thank you x 100!!

    Been having problems with dual monitors with oneiric and whenever X had problems (freezing, unity menu bar disappearing, etc), I had to ctrl-alt to a terminal and init 6.

    “sudo service lightdm restart” saved me a lot of time restarting.

  • jhuebel

    Whoever decided Alt-PrtScr-K was a good idea should be shot.