init 3 problem revisited.

[Robert Locke]

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 18:39 -0500, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> People's answers to me have set me on the right track and here is what
> I have observed now. I just can't understand that no one else has
> noticed this glitch.
> 
> I made the shifting to init 3 in a terminal more mysterious than it
> really is. crl-alt-f1 takes you into a terminal. Login as root and
> run init 3. The machine seems to be hung but typing ctl-alt-f2 takes
> you into another terminal window where of course you are not logged
> on. Then typing ctrl-alt-f1 again will take you back  to the first
> terminal where you are logged on and in into level 3.
> 
> So as people have suggested the going into init level 3 is occurring
> but what is not occurring is the last step in a problem we used to
> have on previous fedoras where going into init 3 would stop at the
> anacron stop step. To get a prompt you would have to hit return.
> Now the return is not accepted and the machine seems to be hung.
> 
> Maybe a bugzilla is needed.

This may in fact be bugzillable (now there is a new word....).

But the original issue of needing to hit return is simply that the
"prompt" is overwritten by the "console" messages generated when
services are starting and stopping.  So your hitting return displays a
new prompt...  The challenge, of course, being that the services are
outside the running shell process so the shell is unaware of needing to
redisplay its prompt.

Now, my other thought on the new problem is this....

1) You are on tty1 (a text based virtual console), logged in as root,
typing in init 3.  If you are in a "window" inside of the GUI/X, then
the blank screen is entirely appropriate - you are still on tty7 but
there is no running process attached to it to display something to you.
2) The screen goes blank?  Or do you still see the init 3 command that
you typed in?  If it is truly going blank, I think you may again be
switched to tty7 without you pressing the keys.  Perhaps the death of X
causes the tty switch much like the start of prefdm/X causes us to
switch to tty7 when we boot.  If this is the case, I am not sure if this
is a bug or perhaps just a feature.... <big grin>

--Rob