Running Linux in Low Memory

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Sunday 23 November 2003 06:51 pm, Leo J Mauler wrote:

> Ctrl-Alt-F7 does nothing either (thats the key combination 
> to shell out of X and switch to a different console term, right?). 

No, that's the key combination that would theoretically switch you from X to 
VT7, which is X.  Null effect.  Ctrl-Alt-F(1-6).

> Ctrl-Alt-Del does a graceful reboot, and the console comes back  
> up after rebooting, so at least there's a kludgy way out of it.

As to your other VC question, standard Linux mode 5 has 6 VT's, plus X on VT7.  
Mode 3 is everything but X.  Mode 1 or "Linux Single" is a single console, no 
networking, and many multi-user functions disabled.  Sometimes (mostly in 
recent releases) not even a login screen.  It's intended for "maintenance", 
as in "I've completely hosed the system and I hope it will at least boot to 
Single-User mode so I can have a prayer of fixing it".

Culling your VT's back to 4, or even 1, should not affect whether X runs 
properly.  Now if you were to eliminate that one VT, you could probably still 
run X, but not exit from it...