Slashdot Mirror
Does Your PC Really Need a SysRq Button Anymore?
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wondered what the SysRq key on your keyboard does? Lenovo has decided it's so rarely used that it has started removing the key from some new Thinkpad Edge laptops. We already know that Lenovo are something of the fastidious scientists when it comes to keyboard design. Last time they fiddled with the age-old key layout, it was after painstaking research to count exactly how many times users press the Delete and Escape keys. Now it seems another relic of computer keyboards is starting to disappear."
When I learned to type we didn't have these extra "one" and "zero" keys. We used lower case "ell" and upper case "Oh" and we were happy, dang it!
"You can have my SysRq key when you pry it from my cold dead ThinkPad!"
Lenovo doesn't need to do any debugging so the key is superfluous to them.
Yep... just confirmed that it also works even if Linux isnt frozen...
That is the Print Screen key. Don't ever remove that key from the keyboard! I don't care that the word "SysRq" is written below "Print Screen" on that key. Feel free to remove that "SysRq" word from there, but do NOT remove the handy print screen key! Thanks.
But if we drop the sysrq key we'll finally have room for the any key.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If linux freezes, then Alt-SysRq-S+U+B will do an emergency sync of the disks, unmount them and reboot the system.
Bah! That almost looks like an emacs keycombo. M-x-Ctrl-v-p-o-k-l-m-z-w and then press your spacebar with your nose, and it'll do the same thing by the way. It's really handy to have such a shortcut, but the odds of your cat walking over the keyboard and hitting that particular combo are pretty high.
that the user is pressing the SysRq key.
In fact, to *urgently* tell the OS that the SysRq. It's not supposed to be buffered or anything, it supposed to grab the OS by the collar and scream "THE USER JUST PRESSED THE DAMMNED SYSRQ KEY!!!!" at it.
But what is that supposed to mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
That's the whole point.
When they were designing the keyboard, they thought of all the things that you might want a keyboard to say ("STOP SCROLLING", "Show me that last page", "Get me the hell out of this input mode"). And after they'd mandated keys for everything anybody could think of, they had a stroke of genius. They mandated a key that did nothing anybody wanted to do.
Why is that a stroke of genius?
It is something rare in engineering, which thrives on bravado and feverishly inflated self-confidence. It is an admission of the limitation of human foresight, an acknowledgement that there are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies; a semiotic *memento mori*.
This key is mandated to mean nothing, therefore it can mean anything, or indeed, everything.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Frankly, there are a lot of keys we could get rid of, because they just take up real estate and don't help with the way I use the keyboard. I rarely have rekwirements to use the Q key, and I'm kwite sure that others could get by without it, too. These key-friendly users just need to akwire new work habits. What's hard about that?
Print screen is tool for terrorists and pirates! You could copy all 15 hours of the extended edition of lord of the rings by using print screen on each frame of film and saving it all to uncompressed bitmaps.[/humor]
I use the SysRq key on an almost daily basis whenever I screw up a kernel compile
Hey, how is Gentoo nowadays?
.
Trolling is a art,
You can use ALT-F4 instead - try it now.
AT&ROFLMAO
Hang on, he'll get back to you in 36 hours with an optimal rejoinder.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You'd be surprised, I pressed it twice just while typing this comment.
You're hired! - Steve Jobs
Haha, who's laughing now. I did it in six hours!!! And you mocked my -funroll-loops and -O16. Who's laughing now???
Careful. I accidently typed Alt - SysRq - R + E + I + S + E + R and my wife disappeared.