Re: How to kill X?
On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:17, Pigeon wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 08:49:26PM +1300, cr wrote:
> > On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 03:49, Pigeon wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:11:53PM +1300, cr wrote:
(snip)
> > > >
> > > > Are there any downsides to ext3?
> > >
> > > If you have a filesystem with a dirty journal you MUST try and replay
> > > the journal, ie, fsck it, before doing anything else with it. If you
> > > forget this you'll probably end up with worse damage than if you made
> > > the same mistake with ext2. ext3 can be mounted as ext2 in emergency,
> > > eg. if your rescue kernel hasn't got ext3 support, but don't be
> > > tempted to mount it read-write.
> >
> > I think, with my capability for pushing the wrong button at critical
> > moments, I might be safer to stick with ext2 then.
>
> Well, I admit that I found out about this the hard way. But I think
> that was when I was running slink; the woody versions of the tools all
> seem to spit out warnings if you try and treat ext3 as ext2.
>
> AIUI running fsck on ext2 will return the filesystem to a logically
> consistent state but doesn't guarantee that you won't lose or corrupt
> any files - as you've found out. ext3's journalling is a big safeguard
> against this. It is unfortunate that power failures are one area where
> this safeguard is noticeably incomplete.
It seems to me that, since X is running on top of Linux, keyboard input must
go to linux first then to X, and therefore it should be possible to program
some keystroke combination (e.g. Alt-Ctrl-Backspace, though I still don't
know if that works in the event of an X siezure) that would either tell Linux
to just kill X or even, in dire emergency, tell Linux to 'unmount all drives
*now* and shut down'.
This would be handy since in my (limited) experience, X is often a bit shaky
whereas Linux is rock-solid. It would also be handy in cases of e.g.
monitor failure or video card glitches etc. (I'm running a standalone on a
dial-up modem so telnetting in, as someone suggested, isn't really practical
for me).
But I'm no programmer so I don't know.
cr
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