A further ctrl-alt-backspace mystery.

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 04:27:06PM +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> What problems are you having?
> What is that crazy state?
> On what machine configuration does this crazy state happen?
> 
> Gilboa
> 
> On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 07:54 -0500, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 10:37:10AM +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > > In general, a simple change in the BIOS AGP/PCI settings can cause a
> > > stable machine to go wild.
> > > Can you post the machine hardware configuration?
> > > BTW, "DontZap" "False" is the default. You can delete it altogether.
> > > 
I don't know where to start. Let us take two machines with the same
hardware as an example:
Dell Precision 380
Intel P4 multi-threaded 3.0 Ghz.
ATI Technologies video cars V380 with 16 Mb of memory.
usb keyboard and mouse. (by the way it is not clear how one specifies
that you have a usb keyboard rather then a pci keyboard. Can anyone
tell me that?)

As side issue we have machines where ctrl-alt-backspace does not work
unless "DontZap" "False" is explicitly in the xorg.conf)

Obviously I should not have said the machine goes into crazy state
when ctrl-alt-backspace is hit, But I did not know how to indicate
that machines with different architectures do different things when
this key sequence is struck.

Right now the two Precision 380-s with the same system software do
different things when the key sequence is struck. One blackens the
screen and after a few seconds redisplays the gdm login screen. The
other displays lines similar to those when changing to init level 3
ending in a prompt. However, today I waited the machines out and let
it do its thing. After 20 seconds or so the prompt disappears and the
login screen reappears. So in the end both end up doing the job but
one seems to think about it longer.

This time difference to reboot the login screen shows up in comparing
other pairs of machines of the same architecture but in a second case
one of the machines reboots the login screen in 3 seconds the other
has the machine go black for much longer before the login screen
appears.

All this is so amorphous that I don't expect anyone to have a specific
solution. But what I am understanding from the group is that
ctrl-alt-backspace works for other people without a problem.
Is that correct?
-- 

=======================================================================
Bilbo's First Law:
	You cannot count friends that are all packed up in barrels.
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484