F8 either rebooting or restarting X while I'm away

[Mike]

Steve Searle <steve <at> stevesearle.com> writes:

> Assuming it was not a locked screen saver asking for your password (and
> from what you have said it isn't), then this certainly *isn't* normal
> behaviour and it is a problem.
> 
> I would agree with others who think it may be a crashing screensaver
> taking down the X Windows system.  I have had this in the past when I
> have had a random selection of screen savers.  I would disable
> screensavers and see if the problem goes away.  If it does, you can then
> activate them one at a time until it appears.  In my experience the
> problem is worse with 3gl cards and proprietary drivers.

I can confirm this type of behaviour also. On machines running F8 with
the KDE desktop and running gl screensavers I had one machine hang X
completely as soon as the mouse was moved - the machine was running
and i could ssh in, but X had crashed completely and even doing 
telinit 3 followed by telinit 5 did not restart X. This repeated at
various random intervals. 

The only option I could find at that point was to reboot. 
Changing back to a non-gl screensaver gave no recurrence of this problem.

It is possible others are seeing these symptoms and rebooting but not
reporting.