Re: those problems where the easiest thing to do seems to be to reboot...

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

CND OConnor wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've used linux quite a while now, but every so often I do something to
> my system I can't fix that I know will go away if I reboot. I'm lazy, I
> guess, so I do. I can always make some tea. Its very silly though I'm
> sure I needn't, so can someone suggest what to do when,
> 
> 1) you 'cat' a file you shouldn't in the console mode. before you know
> it everything on the commandline becomes an unreadable mess of ascii
> characters you didn't know you had.

  others already suggested solution but you can alos run:

  file somefile.bin

  to find out what the file is.  or use less or vi which handles binary
files well (it might depend on some settings, so check it before you
ruin your favourite console:-)

> 2) X crashes (hasn't for a while actually) and dumps you in a grey
> screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else. (That would be running
> unstable, helix-gnome, enlightenment and gdm with mozilla to crash it).
> I've tried restarting the gdm daemon but that doesn't work.

  this is not an X crash but x window manager crash, probably. just
restart the window manager (by runnig specific window manager or by
running x-window-manager)

	erik