Quitting a stuck EmulationStation or calling up the console

Tango

I know that Emulation Station does not use X for the GUI display. I don't know if that's causing my issue or if it's a over-simplistic keyboard.

On other Linux systems, I can press CTRL-ALT-F1 and that drops me out of X (which stays active in the background) and gives me a console to work on. I try that with EmulationStation and it doesn't work. Is it supposed to?

The main reason I'm asking is that I'm finding that sometimes I run into an issue with EmulationStation, like the time I accidentally ended up configuring inputs when I didn't want to. I've had ES freeze on me. (One time I was using the RGUI to edit retroarch.cfg.)

So if I'm in EmulationStation, or editing a config file by going through ES's menus to get to that point, and ES stops working or behaving like I need, how can I exit it and get to a console without rebooting?

mitu

@Tango said in Quitting a stuck EmulationStation or calling up the console:

On other Linux systems, I can press CTRL-ALT-F1 and that drops me out of X (which stays active in the background) and gives me a console to work on. I try that with EmulationStation and it doesn't work. Is it supposed to?

Yes, it's normal.

The main reason I'm asking is that I'm finding that sometimes I run into an issue with EmulationStation, like the time I accidentally ended up configuring inputs when I didn't want to. I've had ES freeze on me. (One time I was using the RGUI to edit retroarch.cfg.)
So if I'm in EmulationStation, or editing a config file by going through ES's menus to get to that point, and ES stops working or behaving like I need, how can I exit it and get to a console without rebooting?

Press F4 on the keyboard, it should exit cleanly leaving a login console open.

Tango

Okay, that worked just fine.

Thank you.

brimby

@Tango Another thing you can do to cleanly shut down your system if it's too stuck to get back to the command line is SSH into your pi and run the command sudo shutdownThere are a lot of apps and programs for SSHing in. One example is JuiceSSH for Android. There are times it can be too frozen to even allow an SSH tunnel, but other times it's the only way to get a clean shut down. Just know that sudo shutdown "schedules" a shutdown a few minutes out, so if you use this method wait a few minutes to see the shut down actually commence.