Alan McKinnon wrote:
On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote:
In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing. You also need to understand
that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys. I didn't and
had to do a hard shutdown. I had to actually pull the plug to do any
good. Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I
could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen
again with no mouse or keyboard. It would be really bad if even that
didn't work with devicekit. I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never
know do we?
Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of
desktop system design:
As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit of
what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse and
display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution and
the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give the
user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an epic
fail.
Magic SysRq falls so far short of this that it's not even worth contemplating.
It's useful for mega-power users and kernel devs doing really way out things,
but for normal users it might as well be invisible. Sure, it's documented in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt. Well now, I offer two comments:
I doubt that kernel docs are even installed on most user-centric distros, and
anyone want to present an argument why the location of that file and it's
contents might be construed as being "self-evident and/or obvious"?
I do remember when I was using Mandrake, the kernel sources wasn't even
installed. I don't know if that option was even enabled in the kernel.
With Mandrake, they just enabled modules for everything.
When this happened to me, just being able to do a ctrl al backspace
would have been good. I did try it but it didn't work either. That
would at least be a good rescue in case of failure.
Dale
:-) :-)
