How to restore from a scrambled screen?

Question

My screen is scrambled while reading some unexpected chars,

enter image description here

It happens in a local tty, so logging out won't help.

Any ideas? Hopefully I don't have to reboot

If Ctrl-l or reset doesn't work, you could try setfont... — jasonwryan, Oct 06 '13 at 04:23
@jasonwryan Oh I thought that was a encoding problem, going to try that soon — daisy, Oct 06 '13 at 04:30

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 06 '13 at 06:04

9

Either type reset at the prompt, or if it's a graphical terminal it probably has a menu option to reset the terminal. If it's a virtual terminal then restarting the getty process providing the terminal will accomplish the same thing.

What happens is the terminal got stuck in "alternate character set". So it just needs to be reset to normal state.

edited Oct 06 '13 at 06:04

strugee

14,951

answered Oct 06 '13 at 04:38

Keith

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Just confirmed reset works in a terminal emulator as well ;-P – daisy Dec 06 '13 at 02:42

How to restore from a scrambled screen?

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