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Well it depends on how you got into your distro sets up it's runlevels I guess. If you are booting into a gui login, then CTRL ALT BACKSPACE will just restart your X server, and put you back into your gui login screen. If you are booting into a login prompt, CTRL ALT BACKSPACE should kill your X server and put you back at a command prompt.
However, you can also go back to the tty that you startx from (maybe tty1 so CTRL ALT F1) and then kill X with a CTRL C. This will kill whatever process is running on that tty and then you can startx again.
You're welcome One more thing that I didn't really make clear..
You can also switch runlevels without restarting the computer. Look into /etc/inittab and note the runlevels. You can safely switch to the non-gui multi-user runlevel (usually init 3) by just (as root):
init 3
This might help when trying to CTRL ALT BACKSPACE to kill X since it's depending on which runlevel you are in.
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