Idea: When users press Ctrl+Alt+Bksp, tell them the new way to kill Xorg

[Jason Spiro]

Timothy Normand Miller <theosib at ...> writes:

> What do you do if something's gone wrong with the virtual terminals?
> I've had this happen plenty of times in the past.  Broken driver (in X
> or kernel) doesn't restore VGA or the graphical console, so you get a
> blank screen.  Despite that, exiting X will somehow cause the console
> to get restored.  Although X is far better than it was in the past, I
> can't accept that it now never has this problem.  [...]

If there is a broken driver, you should file a bug report.  Now that
Ctrl+Alt+Bksp is disabled by default, such bug reports will probably be treated
as higher-priority than they used to be.

> [...]
> None of this, of course, is necessarily an argument in favor of
> ctrl-alt-backspace.  It's a convenient way to kill X, but that too is
> not any kind of universal solution.  What about those cases when the
> text console is not restored on exit?  And if you had a problem with
> "X -configure", and ctrl-alt-backspace does work and exit you back to
> the console, that doesn't solve the problem of being unable to
> configure X, which is unrelated to the key combination.
> 
> Maybe X needs a watchdog timer for hangs and more robustness in
> dealing with crashes, drivers that don't work, and other config
> issues.  [...]

Good points.

> [...]
> Also, ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't do you any good when your problem is
> your keyboard input driver.  I use Gentoo, and sometimes when the core
> is updated, the evdev driver doesn't work without a recompile.
> [...]

So Gentoo doesn't automatically recompile evdev when it recompiles the core?  If
not, why not?