Recovering from a hard X lock up

[Roberto Ragusa]

James Allsopp wrote:
> Hi,
> My Fedora 10 machine locks up X completely, but I can still login via
> SSH. The monitor still shows the X window, but nothing changes, no
> clock, mouse nothing. X processes are still running, but not sure how to
> go about shutting them down. Last night, I tried to get the system to
> shut down sanely by running shutdown -h now and although the command ran
> and I couldn't login via ssh anymore, the machine did not shut down.
> 
> Can anyone tell me how to shutdown and restart X properly. Tried things
> like startx( had a x lock file exists error) and init 3, but nothing worked.
> 

Does capslock still change the LED status? If not, bad sign.

You can use the "ps auxww" command to see the PID of the X process and then

kill PID

or, more strongly,

kill -9 PID.

(equivalenty, killall X and killall -9 X).

Killing X will kill all the graphical applications and start X again
if you are in runlevel 5.

But, as you said that init 3 failed to shut down X, I'm afraid the
hardware is left in a state where recovery is not possible.

(FYI, "startx -- :1" would have tried to start a second X instance,
bypassing the existing lock)

Best regards.
-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it