Re: Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:33 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 20:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > >  > The problem, as has already been mentioned and which you seem to
> > > have 
> > > > overlooked is that when an administrator finds it's locked up, it's
> > > too 
> > > > late to fix it.
> > > If it is really locked up, the current change won't affect you. A
> > > half 
> > > struck system, it is matter of restarting and resetting it. You can 
> > > avoid that even, if you read up what has changed as any good 
> > > administrator should.
> > My system just locked up. No response to Ctrl-Alt-BSpace, Ctrl-Alt-Fn,
> > even Ctrl-Alt-Del. I logged in via ssh from my iPhone and brought it
> > down gently, though I could of course have simply changed run levels.
> >
> > In this kind of situation it would be nice to have an unblockable
> > attention key, like SysRq but not so low-level. Something that would
> > simply force the system into VT2 for example, and didn't depend on X
> > working.
>
> You can't do that, really.  Getting to vt2 requires getting X to let go
> of the hardware, because the vt subsystem is a raging pile of trash that
> we would be _far_ better off just deleting.  Read that again: X has to
> voluntarily relinquish the hardware.  If it isn't responding to c-a-bs,
> it certainly isn't going to respond to any other requests.

One reason X won't listen for c-a-bs is that it's configured not to. And 
that's now the default setting.


> But nooooo.  Gotta keep having VTs so we can recover when X screws up.
> I mean, it's the unix way.  Which apparently means designing failure in
> from the start, and calling it a feature.

I do most of my work at VTs, I configure an even dozen of them on most 
of my systems, and then use screen for good measure. I also boot with 
VGA=794, and where that doesn't work I use modprobe and fbset to get a 
1280x1024 framebuffer. If I can't get that, I really do not want to use 
that computer.

> This is a bad design.  The panic button doesn't make it better, it just
> makes it okay to be even worse than the design requires.  Take the
> training wheels off already.
<rolls eyes>


--

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa coco merseine nu  Z1aaaaaaa coco merseine nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)