Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)

[John Summerfield]

A
> 
> c-a-bs ought to be handled by the session as an alias for logout.  Or
> possibly task manager.
> 

No it ought not. c-a-bs is supposed to pull the rug from underneath 
failed applications. It's an emergency measure, supposedly effective 
when Windows and Apple users would be hitting the power button.

> I appreciate the hyperbole on the rest of this thread, and I really
> don't have a strong opinion on the default setting (well, I do, but I'm
> willing to bend to popular opinion), but I do wish to make the following
> argument:
> 
> Window systems without a panic button, by and large, do not have
> applications that take down the whole window system, because users are
> unwilling to use such applications.  Therefore, app developers are
> incented to fix their applications, and window system and driver
> developers are incented to fix the system.  They might have apps that
> take down the _kernel_, but a window system panic button wouldn't save
> you there anyway.

The most recent near-like problem I had was on Windows Server. The 
application I was using became unresponsive (I was using it via RDP, a 
dubious proposition at the best of times), and the next think I knew the 
system had rebooted.


> Window systems with a panic button, however, do not have this robustness
> property.  They can get away with having server functionality that does
> not clean up properly, because there's always a janitor of last resort.
> Likewise applications need not be overly concerned about fixing their
> crash paths, because, why bother.  So they're never good, merely
> adequate.
> 
> If someone can come up with a scenario where you really need zap, and
> not just vt switch and/or logout dialog, I'm eager to hear it.  If you
> can come up with one that isn't "some broken application took a server
> grab and won't give it back", I'll even be interested.

I have a Tosh laptop that locks up when the screensaver kicks in. It's 
running F9 (and probably not going to get a newer release, each is 
bigger and slower then the previous).

My system at work, CentOS4, locked up today. In this case it's on a KVM 
along with another Linux system, so I used telinit to change runlevels.

Getting RHEL5-clone up on my HP DC7700 caused much grief and killing of 
X. In that case, the eventual solution was RHEL5.2-clone.






-- 

Cheers
John

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