On 0, Kent West <westk@nicanor.acu.edu> wrote: > 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? > > > >Thanks, > >Peter Christensen > > > > > > Others have addressed this, but let me add that there's a "Magic > SysRequest" key (or something similar) that can help you regain control > in some situations like this. I've never used it (nor studied up on it), > but thought I'd mention it in case you want to pursue it. It's an option > when you compile your own kernel. Alt+SysRq+S - Sync Disks. Alt+SysRq+U - Remount filesystems read-only. Alt+SysRq+B - Reboot the machine (effectively a warm reboot). This sequence should save your disks, and is available in almost any crash. I'm not sure if its enabled in the default Debian kernel, though. Tom -- Tom Cook Information Technology Services, The University of Adelaide "Chaos Theory is a new theory invented by scientists panicked by the thought that the public were beginning to understand the old ones." - Mike Barfield Get my GPG public key: https://pinky.its.adelaide.edu.au/~tkcook/tom.cook-at-adelaide.edu.au
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