On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Jerry James <loganjerry(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Colin Walters
<walters(a)verbum.org> wrote:
> If you want to run terminal applications, can't you just log in to a
> full screen gnome-terminal?
I got the impression that Janina was talking about those who need
audio to be able to login in the first place.
Probably both. In any case, our answer is GDM and gnome-terminal.
Those have been useful to me in a lot of circumstances that I
don't
see going away anytime soon. Here are a few just off the top of my
head.
1. It's late. I'm tired. I log out, then remember some small system
administration task I meant to do. Rather than wait for all the GUI
stuff to reload as I log back in, it is much faster to switch to a
text console, login there, do my task, then log back out.
"Login is slow" - something we know about and makes sense to fix,
rather than having an entirely different way to log in. Another
answer is that if you hold down a magic key sequence (say
Ctrl-Shift-t) then you get just gnome-terminal.
2. I'm playing some game that runs at a low resolution and it
crashes.
I don't know why, but my mouse is almost always nonfunctional
afterwards. When my desktop is at 320x200 and I can't use the mouse,
regaining control is difficult. I often switch to a text console so I
can clean up some running programs in a nice way before I
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get my X back.
First, fix the app. Second, invest some in making the system robust
against applications that crash. Third, land
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CrashHandling so you don't need
to use GDB manually.
3. I launch some X program that consumes 100% CPU and is clearly out
of control. In those cases, the mouse becomes sluggish. It can take
a very long time to either launch a gnome-terminal or get the mouse
over a gnome-terminal so I can click on it, have the click actually
move the focus to that window, type the command to kill the process,
have the typed text actually show up on the gnome-terminal, press the
Enter key, then wait the shell to process the command. It is MUCH
faster to switch to a text console, login, kill the process, logout,
and switch back to X.
I don't see that problem here with an app just burning a core. Now if
you're in swap, obviously that's a whole other issue.