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

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 11:00:56PM +0000, Jason Spiro wrote:
> Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at ...> writes:
> > [...]
> > the feature to zap is readily available and Ryan even went through the
> > effort of putting up screenshots and labeling them where to click to enable
> > this feature. IMO this is better than displaying a message about VT
> > switching 
> 
> The reason that zapping was disabled by default is because it's too easy for
> some users to zap by accident.  Instead of telling users how to re-enable
> zapping, which will let them to zap by accident in the future, we should tell
> them how to switch VTs and then kill X from the command line.
 
not quite. it's disabled because it's a feature that has the potential to
destroy data and it can be accidentally triggered by a user who doesn't know
it exists.

someone who knows it exists and still triggers it accidentally (e.g. me)
isn't really the target user for this change.

> > - which has some other issues as Alan pointed out.
> 
> Yes, Alan raised a good issue earlier.  I propose the following solution.  The
> xmessage should say:
> 
> "To shut down the X Window System, click the Shut Down (or similar) button or
> menu option on your screen.  If that doesn't work, press Ctrl+Alt+F1, log in as
> root, then enter the following line:
> 
> pkill -n X ; sleep 5s ; pkill -9 -n X"

That can be done by the session manager (including the option to enable
zapping at that point).
However, by the time the server needs zapping, you're usually in a state
where you can't display anything anymore.

> > We've already admitted that the change wasn't communicated well enough, so
> > having a short answer with a link to the howto may just help the next person
> > googling for it.
> 
> Do you mean that Xorg should show an xmessage with a link to an appropriate
> instructional webpage?  That would work too.  But it's hard to start a web
> browser to view the link if, say, your mouse doesn't work.  So I think showing
> an xmessage with pkill instructions would be better.

I was referring to the email.

Cheers,
  Peter