On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Nikos Ntarmos wrote:

> Hi there.
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 04:35:39PM -0500, jazzman@exdomain.org wrote:
>>> Yeah, I have never successfully returned to the shell after exitting
>>> X. I think you can ssh into the 620 and kill the Xserver though. Or
>>> just reboot from an xterm. Maybe it needs a swap area. It is
>>> possible to use nfs swap.
> [...]
>> Thanks again! :) I still get a kick out of seeing X start up on my HPC...
>
> I have also run into this problem with my 690. I've found that starting
> X using something like 'exec xinit' circumvents the return-to-shell
> issue, but this is just a workaround anyway...
>
> Have a happy new year btw...

To return to the console from X, you simply need to kill the process 
running "X". Log in as root from an xterm, pipe ps into grep to find 
the pid, then kill. Taking down the X server will also take down the 
open windows in a fairly orderly fashion. No need to ssh from another 
machine, though that might work if you have hung things up by trying 
to exit some other way.

Mike