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Re: safe emergency shutdown?



At 02:31 PM 8/29/2002 -0400, David Roundy wrote:
On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 02:25:24PM -0400, Peter Christensen wrote:
> I'm fairly new to Debian and Linux, so this may have the most obvious
> answer, but here's what happened:
>
> I added an application to the panel in kde (I think that's what it's
> called; it's the strip along the bottom where you can click to activate
> the console, help, etc.)  This worked OK, but the new icon was hidden
> behind the scroll arrows on the right side, so I tried moving it to the
> left.  At that point nothing worked again on the panel.  I was able to
> get to the console by doing an alt-F1 (I think) and then shut down the
> system safely.  But this morning I tried to remove the new icon from the
> panel.  And again, the panel froze, so I couldn't start any applications.
> Also, the keyboard was dead.  Alt-Fn didn't work, ctrl-alt-del did
> nothing, and even when I hit the caps-lock the caps-lock light didn't go
> on.  The mouse still worked, but I couldn't start any applications.  So I
> ended up turning the power off.
>
> I understand that bad things can happen if you just turn off the power while
> Linux is running.  But it seemed that I had no alternative.  Any idea what
> happened here, and what I should have done to get out of it?

You had no alternative, in my opinion. Do a hard reset and don't lose sleep over it. :-)

My only suggestion would be to upgrade to a journaling file system. The easist is usually ext3, assuming your kernel supports it.

My only guess is that you didn't try ctrl-alt-Fn (but did try it the first
time.  Another combo to try is ctrl-alt-backspace, which should kill X.

I've been told that the Caps-lock "check" is a way to tell if the lockup is hardware or software. In his case, pressing the Caps-lock key didn't turn the indicator light on or off so his hardware is locked up. Crtl-Alt-Fn or Crtl-Alt-Bksp and so on would do nothing.


Hall



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