My family just recently switched to Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS on our matching Thinkpad 11e’s. I’ve been running mine for about two weeks or so without issue, but just today my Dad’s froze. I’ve experienced two other Linux freezes before (at Fedora) and recovered by holding down the power button, but I’ve heard that it’s better to avoid a hard restart.
I had heard that the key combination alt + SysRq + reisub will gracefully restart, and that SysRq is usually the same as PrtSc. I tried it and it didn’t seem to work. I ran the command cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
to see if SysRq is enabled on my computer. According to this, this will show 1 if it is activated on 0 if not. But I got the number 176
instead, not sure what this means?
$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
176
So is this command available in 16.04? What options do I have to recover from an unresponsive system? We ended up doing a hard restart, and I’m not at all sure that was the healthiest thing for the system.
Thanks for your help!