I had to spend 7 hours in transit at Perth airport -- not much to do but
use the free internet kiosk. There was a little note attached to the
keyboard
If the system has locked up, press ctrl-alt-backspace
Oh, ctrl-alt-backspace is a feature, because it is documented somewhere.
Anyway, I did it, and sure enough, X restarted, and autologged-in as
'kioskuser'. It seemed to be running Opera, although there was no title
bar or menu bar.
There was a button labelled 'Delete Private Data' which I pressed: this
rebooted the whole machine.
On the plane with my family, one of our entertainment terminals
restarted in the middle of a movie, showing linux restarting.
There was a USB socket on the seat next to the display. The airline
magazine said that you could plug in a USB stick, ipod, etc and use it
to play music or view photos. My son inserted his flash drive, opened a
photo, and ... the thing locked up. So I got out the control device
(used for playing games, or, in $$$ class, for sending emails), to see
if I could find ctrl-alt-delete or ctrl-alt-backspace. No, but there was
function-alt-backspace, so I pressed those.
X restarted, leaving the grey background and the cross-shaped mouse
cursor when /etc/X/config-whatever file is bad, and we could do nothing
more with the terminal.
The cabin crew said they could restart it 'in the galley', but after
trying two or three times, and asking if we had seen lots of writing on
the display, we could not get it going again. I explained the situation
(...and I pressed a whole bunch of random keys on the keyboard,
including this one, that one and that other one...), but we had to use
that seat for sleeping in.
Stephen Irons
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