Monday, April 02, 2012
Disabling the console switching keys for Android
Some time ago I was doing development on an Android phone and using a BlueTooth keyboard I came across an intriguing behaviour. Hitting the Alt+Left or Alt+Right key combo, the phone would seemingly stop working and give all the symptoms of a frozen device, no more animated wallpaper and unresponsive touchscreen. This stems from a functionality inherited from Linux for the desktop. In this article I will describe the origin of the issue, how to recover from it and how it can be fixed at the kernel level.
Let's start with Alt+F1 through F12; these allow accessing the tty's. On a typical Linux installation Alt+F1 through F6 allows the user to switch between tty1 through tty6 respectively directly and Alt+F7 (F1 in Fedora) is a special tty in which the graphical interface runs. This can change from distro to distro.
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Background information
In Linux there exist some special key combinations that are handled at the kernel level. In this article we'll be looking at the console key combinations, specifically:- Alt+F1 through F12
- Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F12
- Alt+Left
- Alt+Right
Let's start with Alt+F1 through F12; these allow accessing the tty's. On a typical Linux installation Alt+F1 through F6 allows the user to switch between tty1 through tty6 respectively directly and Alt+F7 (F1 in Fedora) is a special tty in which the graphical interface runs. This can change from distro to distro.
Read more »
Labels: Android, Console, keymap, Linux
