Linux - How to disable or enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut

The combination of the keys Ctrl+Alt+Backspace should be as well known for Linux users as Ctr+Alt+Delete shortcut in the world of Windows. This key shortcut shuts down the xserver or simply graphical environment (this is a kind of operation opposite to this one done by startx command). The issue is in some Linux distibutions (for example Ubuntu) it is disabled by default. In this article I'm going to show you how to control the activity of the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut.

What is the problem?

As I said before, the key shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is disabled in some of the Linux distributions. But why is this shortcut so important? Linux user works often in the console, and this shortcut is the simplest way to kill xserver and to turn on the text mode. This approach which I'm going to show in this note can also work in the opposite way - to disable this combination of the keys if we want to. The question is how can we do it.

How to disable or enable this shortcut?

The solution should be showed in three versions: one for Ubuntu distro from 10.04 release, for other Ubuntu/Debian releases and for other Linux distributions.
If we are using Ubuntu at least from 10.04 version, we can enable or disable this shortcut direclty from system settings. Just go to: System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options and then check or uncheck the section Key sequence to kill the X server.

In turn, if we are using other releases of Ubuntu/Debian distribution and we don't want to edit configuration files manually, we ca use a dontzap application written in Python. If we don't have this program, give the command below:

After that, we can enable this shortcut: or disable: Note that dontzap has a negation in its name so using --disable for enable opration is correct.

In other Linux distributions it might be neccesary to download and compile dontzap program from its source. We can find it there: Project DontZap