Disable Ctrl-Alt-Del in Jessie
In previous Debian releases I would simply comment out the line controlling Ctrl-Alt-Del key presses in the /etc/inittab file, and this would prevent any action from occurring due to pressing those keys. As an example, here is what I had in the inittab file in Wheezy: # What to do when CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed. #ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now In Jessie, this is proving to be more challenging as there is no inittab file to edit, and while I could create one, it would only contain commented lines, having a null effect. It seems that in prior releases, one had to explicitly say what to do in order for anything to happen, and in Jessie, one has to explicitly say "do nothing" or action is taken (the logout/reboot/shutdown prompt is presented with a 30 second timeout). I have seen discussions of manipulating the symbolic link file /etc/systemd/system/control-alt-del.target which points to reboot.target in the same directory. For example, it's been said that linking it to shutdown.target would cause a shutdown action instead of a reboot action. I haven't tried that, but I have tried pointing the link to /dev/null and followed the change with 'systemctl daemon-reload', however it had no effect - I still get the logout/reboot/shutdown prompt in response to pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del. Per another thread, I have also tried creating /etc/init/ctrl-alt-del.conf containing only the single comment line '# do nothing when Ctrl-Alt-Del is pressed', yet this has no effect either - the prompt still appears. So I'm at a loss for the moment. Please advise if you know how to completely disable Ctrl-Alt-Del in Jessie - I want the key press to be ignored, just like it was in Wheezy I commented out the line in inittab shown above. Thanks.
Re: Disable Ctrl-Alt-Del in Jessie [Solved]
Thanks, Martin. With that info, I was able to confirm that the link 'control-alt-del.target -> /dev/null' does disable C-A-D from a tty. And it took a bit to find it, but the behavior in KDE can be managed in: System Settings --> Shortcuts and Gestures --> Global Keyboard Shortcuts --> The KDE Session Manager (from the pull down menu) There are 3 items there which can be configured independently: Log Out, Log Out without Confirmation, and Reboot without Confirmation. Each can have its own keystroke sequence, or be set to None. Yeah! No more erroneous reboots due to Windows screen lock attempts on Jessie! :-) From: Martin Read Sent: Monday, November 30, 2015 4:31 PM To: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Disable Ctrl-Alt-Del in Jessie On 30/11/15 00:05, Bit Head wrote: > In Jessie, this is proving to be more challenging as there is no inittab > file to edit, and while I could create one, it would only contain > commented lines, having a null effect. It seems that in prior releases, > one had to explicitly say what to do in order for anything to happen, > and in Jessie, one has to explicitly say "do nothing" or action is taken > (the logout/reboot/shutdown prompt is presented with a 30 second timeout). That logout/reboot/shutdown prompt is a feature of your GUI environment, which should have a mechanism for configuring it to do something *else* (or, hopefully, nothing at all) in response to C-A-D. For example, my XFCE4 environment is configured to lock the console when I make the three-finger salute.
