Idea: When users press Ctrl+Alt+Bksp, tell them the new way to kill Xorg
Jason Spiro
jasonspiro4+gmane at gmail.com
Fri Dec 4 10:44:53 PST 2009
Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at ...> writes:
> The X server has no way of displaying a message to users. It could possibly
> log a message to Xorg.0.log which some may see, but probably not many. If
> it's in a state in which the user needs to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it,
> then it's probably not going to be able to fork a new client and have the
> window manager place it and map it.
Often it *can* fork a new client. For example, users often use Ctrl+Alt+Bksp
as a quick way to log out, and may wonder why it doesn't work in recent
versions of Xorg. This would give them a quick answer.
Other users might have just run "X -configure", their mouse might not be
working, and they just want to quickly kill Xorg.
> Even if it could, the instructions you suggested are wrong, and not portable
> to all platforms running Xorg. For instance, on Solaris, "killall"
> literally means "kill *all* processes" - not all matching a certain name, but
> every single process on the system, as part of a shutdown. "pkill" is the
> command to kill processes by name.
On Solaris, killall is in /usr/sbin, not /usr/bin, but point taken: "killall"
might be horrible advice to users of other Unixes.
> Even on Linux, I wouldn't advise kill -9 unless other signals have already
> failed, since that prevents the X server from resetting the hardware to a
> safe state when it exits.
I wanted the xmessage to be concise, so I didn't mention how to send SIGTERM
first. But if you like, you can mention it in the xmessage.
So, in sum, now I think the xmessage should tell users: "To terminate Xorg,
press Ctrl+Alt+F1, then log in as 'root', then enter: pkill -n X || sleep 5s
&& pkill -9 -n X".
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