My first DontZap use case while testing F11 beta

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 09:05:37PM +0200, Lars E. Pettersson wrote:
> On 04/17/2009 08:45 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> >X11 already eats Ctrl+Alt+Del.
> 
> Well, it isn't removed, as ctrl-alt-backspace is proposed to be (it was 
> that I meant wit "zap"), it shows a dialog.

ctrl+alt+del has no special status within X. It's simply a keybinding 
that can be grabbed by the desktop and used to display something. 
ctrl+alt+bs now has an identical status.

> Not sure what happens if X have crashed and one presses ctrl-alt-del 
> though, perhaps someone else who have experienced this could tell us? 
> Will it automatically shut down the system after 60 seconds, even though 
> X is not responding?

That depends on the state the system is in. If X has crashed and exited, 
ctrl+alt+del will reset the system as if you were at the console. If X 
has stopped drawing on screen but is still processing the event loop, a 
dialog will pop up and shut the machine down after 60 seconds. If X 
isn't responding to anything, ctrl+alt+del will do nothing.

> So in a situation where X have crashed, and neither ctrl-alt-del (if 
> that is the case) nor ctrl-alt-backspace works, one have to press the 
> reset button or power cycle the computer, a, in my humble opinion, very 
> bad and brutal way of solving a problem that was elegantly solved with 
> ctrl-alt-backspace.

I don't /think/ (but will defer to people more familiar with this part 
of the server) that it's likely that you'll end up in situations where 
ctrl+alt+del won't work but ctrl+alt+bs will.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org