* Arthur Pemberton pemboa@gmail.com [20090417 21:15]:
On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Anders Rayner-Karlsson anders@trudheim.co.uk wrote:
- Matthew Garrett mjg@redhat.com [20090417 18:52]:
[ snip ]
So - from my perspective, being one of those hate-object "@RH" people, while C-A-Bs was available, my choice was not to use it because the work was more valuable than the 3-4 minutes to assess the situation and to try a few ways to recover it.
Having that choice was good though, wasn't it? In the same way you hadn't copied your keys to another machine, you maybe hadn't added the new zap option to xorg.conf, so you no longer have that option.
Having the choice didn't make a blind bit of difference in this instance as I was determined to keep the work. If I in F11 want Zap capabilities, I can enable it. I'll probably leave it unmapped, so I am encouraged to file defects against misbehaving applications instead.
And I don't think a new user would be expected to type blind in a console... so they would have had to hit the reboot button, or the shutdown button if they don't have a reboot button.
Either way, they'd lose the content of their session. If X really is scrogged, hitting the power-button for a controlled shutdown so that the hardware is reset to sane state is not a bad idea *for the new users with limited skills*.
If you are savvy enough to know about Zap, you're savvy enough to switch it on, just like with SysRq's.
For me my desktop has as many important services running as I have apps -- so restarting X is not as costly as restarting the machine.
I'm glad for you, that you have an X-session so lightweight that you can Zap it without losing any work. I long for the days when I had so little to do on my desktop that I could make such a statement. ;)
-- /Anders