ctrl-alt-f12 =blank screen with cursor - what did I just do?

Hi, perhaps someone can help me with a mystery. In the standard AAO linpus, I hit ctrl-alt-f12 by mistake (was going for a different shortcut in firefox), and instantly got thrown to a black screen with a flashing cursor, that was unresponsive. There was occasional SSD activity, and I could adjust the brightness, hit fn-f6 to blank, etc etc, but with no on-screen messages. All very odd. I watched it for about a minute, debating what to do, and occasionally prodding a key, then it did a power down and restart, and all appears to be fine. Anyone know what I did, and if it was dangerous in any way?

I can't find any mention of linpus effects with this combo either on here, or googling.

 

CTRL+ALT+<function key> on a typical Linux system opens up other consoles. Anything above F6 is designed to run GUI consoles and below F7 to run CLI consoles. Acer has redone things so that these consoles are not available in their version of Linpus. You might have tried CTRL+ALT+F1 or F2 to get back to your regular GUI console. Not sure which console Acer has chosen to use to run the GUI. But I *believe* they've only allowed for 2 consoles, so I'd guess it is 1 or 2.

Cheers.

 

Heh, thanks, at least it wasn't "Delete all secret files" or something. I'll just keep my fingers under control next time. Ta.

 

Well, you did hit a bit of luck. It's never good to just stop a Linux box by turning off power. Too many things are cached and cutting power can leave things quite unstable and sometimes with enough file corruption to prevent a successful reboot. Some folks will purposely leave a sshd running, so that if things like the keyboard/mouse freeze up, one can at least get to the command prompt remotely and do a clean shutdown.

Cheers.

 

Yes, I learned that the hard way a couple of weeks ago. I looked at it as a learning experience.