"Praedor S. Tempus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thank you, I forget I have that app. I will try it next time.
>
> I suppose that since no one has offered a suggestion, that I really am left
> with having to reboot the system rather than restarting X? Having to reboot
> the system leaves a bad taste in my mouth - that is one of the reasons I left
> (and enjoy not using) windoze anymore.
I guess I have 2 responses to that:
1 - yeah, but just think of how much LESS often you have to do it! :-)
2 - I commiserate - I ran some x game a while back on my main machine at home
and it locked completely - the computer was not even looking at the
keyboard (once that happens, you are usually totally dead. SOMETIMES
you'll find that you can still telnet (or better, ssh) in, but not
very often). My guess is that when that happens the program has managed
to exercise a bug in a driver somewhere. As I sit here thinking about it,
I think that maybe some enterprising soul should think about trying to
track down where its happening - but its gonna be interesting, and
since its a hard lockup, you'll probably need some kind of special
hardware that retains its memory during a hard reboot... (and writes
to it are immediate - so saving a log to disk won't cut it).
(Wish *I* had such a nifty piece of hardware! :-0)
3 (who ever said I could count??? I *was* a math major, after all! ;-) -
(I *think* this may have been said before, but my mind is going, and just in
case:)
As intimated above, if the shift lock or caps lock don't toggle the
appropriate LED on the keyboard then your computer is probably hard
locked and only the little red button (or the power switch) will
get you out of it. If those keys work, then try Control-Alt-F<x>
to see if you can get a text console. If not, (or instead of this)
try pinging that machine from another machine on your (local)
network. If you can ping it, then try telnet or ssh. If you can
get in either way, log in, su to root, and kill off the most recent
process (or whatever one you think caused the lockup). Repeat killing
until either you have to reboot because you killed the wrong thing (:-),
or you get the machine back. (I usually start off by killing softly (-11 or
-15) a few times, then if that fails hit it with a -9 - if THAT fails to
kill it you've got a process that is unable to die - usually because of
something its waiting on in the kernel that it cannot have. But sometimes
just because it can take a minute to die ;-) If all else fails, there's
always 'reboot' ;-)
rc
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