I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 06:44 -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
---- <control><alt><shift><backspace> simultaneously will kill X server
probably a good idea to figure out what is going on...check out /var/log/Xorg.0.log (.old if X server is restarted) for clues
Craig
How do,
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 07:53 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 06:44 -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
<control><alt><shift><backspace> simultaneously will kill X server
I'm familiar with the "<control><alt><backspace>" combo, what does the added shift key do?
probably a good idea to figure out what is going on...check out /var/log/Xorg.0.log (.old if X server is restarted) for clues
Craig
taharka
Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 11:27 -0500, taharka wrote:
How do,
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 07:53 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 06:44 -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
<control><alt><shift><backspace> simultaneously will kill X server
I'm familiar with the "<control><alt><backspace>" combo, what does the added shift key do?
---- allows me to inject an apparently utterly useless extra keypress in the process I suppose.
;-)
Craig
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 10:05 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 11:27 -0500, taharka wrote:
How do,
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 07:53 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 06:44 -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
<control><alt><shift><backspace> simultaneously will kill X server
I'm familiar with the "<control><alt><backspace>" combo, what does the added shift key do?
allows me to inject an apparently utterly useless extra keypress in the process I suppose.
;-)
OK, thought maybe there was an added benefit with it. Could have used some last week, as beagled went zombie & I had to pound <Ctrl><Alt><Backspace> repeatedly for ~5min in order to kill the X server :-(
Craig
taharka
Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 06:44 -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
If your keyboard is still being paid attention to, you've a couple of simple options:
You can CTRL ALT F1 over to a text console, log in and issue commands.
You can CTRL ALT BACKSPACE to restart the X server.
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Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
Sure!
Use the key combination Ctrl-Alt-F1 which will switch you to a TTY console (plain text only here and any of the F1-F6 keys will work) now you can log in as root or as yourself if you prefer but you may need root privileges if you are going around killing processes.
In case you don't know, you can find the process most easily using the command:
ps aux|grep $process
substitute the name of the program you think is froze. You will get back the PID of the process that you can use to kill it (kill PID).
You can then use the key combination Ctrl-Alt-F7 to return you to the Xwindows session and see if it is usable again. If so you'll probably want to return to the root session and log out (use command exit or Ctrl-D).
Scott
Please turn off the HTML mail. Thanks.
On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 06:44:42AM -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse. When this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me access to a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
If you have another computer handy, try:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5405
On 2/26/07, Charles Curley charlescurley@charlescurley.com wrote:
Please turn off the HTML mail. Thanks.
On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 06:44:42AM -0800, Larry Kelly wrote:
I have Fedora6 with VIA chipset onboard video and Gnome. Many of the installed applications will freeze the display screen, and mouse.
When
this happens is there a Gnome keyboard shortcut that will give me
access to
a shell prompt, so that I can kill the offending process, or restart X windows. Right now, my only option is to turn the power off.
If you have another computer handy, try:
Or simply set up mgetty so that you can log in through a nullmodem cable on a serial port. Probably safer, too (if very 90ish).
Andras
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 23:36 +0100, Andras Simon wrote:
Or simply set up mgetty so that you can log in through a nullmodem cable on a serial port. Probably safer, too (if very 90ish).
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
On 2/27/07, Chris Mohler cr33dog@gmail.com wrote:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Weep!
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
Andras
Chris
-- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Chris Mohler:
Weep!
Andras Simon:
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
Tim wrote:
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Chris Mohler:
Weep!
Andras Simon:
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 07:59 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
Can you use that sort of thing, though, for when debuggers would have been providing information out the serial port? Or when you'd have been using a serial console managing bootup?
Tim wrote:
On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 07:59 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
Can you use that sort of thing, though, for when debuggers would have been providing information out the serial port? Or when you'd have been using a serial console managing bootup?
A lot of servers (at least IBM, Sun, Dell) these days do provide network access to the console with an extra management port. If you have enough machines that it is a real issue you can get these models. Otherwise you use a kvm or just plug in the monitor and keyboard when you need it (usb keyboards are good for that). Places like Google probably don't even bother. The time it takes to debug a broken machine on site costs more than replacing it. I usually compromise, using machines with swappable drives and try to revive them with a disk swap before giving up.
On 2/27/07, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Tim wrote:
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Chris Mohler:
Weep!
Andras Simon:
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
If you regularly need to have access to your computer over the network, then you already have sshd running on it, and you have no problem to solve. But I'd hate (read: wouldn't know how to do it securely, in a finite amount of time) to open up a port and run sshd just to be able to log in remotely once in a blue moon to kill some stupid gnome thingy. The serial approach is relatively simple and you don't have to worry about future security holes discovered in the tcp/ip stack, iptables and sshd.
Andras
Andras Simon wrote:
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
If you regularly need to have access to your computer over the network, then you already have sshd running on it, and you have no problem to solve.
I generally don't find computers to be very useful without networking and the ability to access them without touching them.
But I'd hate (read: wouldn't know how to do it securely, in a finite amount of time) to open up a port and run sshd just to be able to log in remotely once in a blue moon to kill some stupid gnome thingy.
Pretty much every linux distribution comes with that capability already carefully planned and does the right thing if you install it.
The serial approach is relatively simple and you don't have to worry about future security holes discovered in the tcp/ip stack, iptables and sshd.
Other people are worrying about that. All you have to do is use good passwords and keep your system up to date. Much less attention is probably being paid to the security risks of mgetty or serial ports.
On 2/27/07, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Andras Simon wrote:
These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable with the right-sized, right-gender ends. If you don't have a hub, use a crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh. Or get wireless working and forget about all that nonsense.
If you regularly need to have access to your computer over the network, then you already have sshd running on it, and you have no problem to solve.
I generally don't find computers to be very useful without networking and the ability to access them without touching them.
I almost agree. Life would be much more complicated if I couldn't access remotely my shell account at work. But at home, I'm quite happy with a computer with networking but without the ability to be ssh'd into. (And there are some computers I'd find _very_ useful even without any kind of networking... but they're very expensive :-))
But I'd hate (read: wouldn't know how to do it securely, in a finite amount of time) to open up a port and run sshd just to be able to log in remotely once in a blue moon to kill some stupid gnome thingy.
Pretty much every linux distribution comes with that capability already carefully planned and does the right thing if you install it.
Do you mean that installing sshd and iptables and perhaps a few more packages is all one needs to do? I'd think that even if you don't plan to provide access, you have to do a couple of things before a new Fedora box is ready to face the internet. But maybe you're right: the tweakings I usually do is shutting down various services, and tightening up (to the best of my knowledge - which is not much) the firewall rules. So, if I wanted to allow remote access, I'd need to do less, not more.
The serial approach is relatively simple and you don't have to worry about future security holes discovered in the tcp/ip stack, iptables and sshd.
Other people are worrying about that. All you have to do is use good passwords and keep your system up to date. Much less attention is probably being paid to the security risks of mgetty or serial ports.
They may be full of security holes that are exploitable _locally_. But remotely?
Andras
On 2/27/07, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Chris Mohler:
Weep!
Andras Simon:
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
I'm dead serious, too! (Especially about the cursing part :-).) I actually used a nullmodem cable (+ mgetty and kermit) to connect my Linux boxes back when they didn't have NICs.
As an aside: I also used PLIP for a while (that's IP via the parallel port, for those who are too young to know). That was much better for large file transfers. But this was back in the days when I compiled my own kernel (I haven't done that since RH7.3 or maybe even 6.2). If I wanted to connect two boxes with anything more complicated than a nullmodem now, I'd have to ask it here how to proceed...
I don't know what drives a usb->serial converter, but if things are in such a state that it can't do its thing, then probably mgetty can't either, and the power switch is your best bet. But I hope that X going berserk doesn't result in such a mess.
Andras
On Tuesday 27 February 2007 5:54:52 am Tim wrote:
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Chris Mohler:
Weep!
Andras Simon:
No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver. But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
I once used a NetMOS PCI card that provided four additional serial ports so that I could access both a modem and a UPS on a motherboard with only one serial port. Cheap and effective. (It's no longer in use, however -- my new UPS has a USB interface, and I moved from dialup to cable.) -- cmg
Tim wrote:
Tim:
What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
I was serious in asking it. While I haven't done the serial console trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such things. I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have anything available to drive it.
For desktops, you can get a PCI card with serial ports. I have a 2 serial/1 parallel card that works great. They also make PCMCIA/Cardbus serial cards, but they tend to be hard to find, and expensive. If you go the USB to serial route, just remember that the cheap ones don't usually support the status lines, so you have to use software flow control, not hardware flow control. Also, some devices will not work properly without properly functioning hardware flow control. (Windows CE devices for example.)
Mikkel
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Andras Simon -
Carroll Grigsby -
Charles Curley -
Chris Mohler -
Craig White -
Craig White -
Larry Kelly -
Les Mikesell -
Mikkel -
Oldman -
taharka -
Tim