Restarting Xserver from cli

[Dotan Cohen]

> What can I say. I have been cursed with ATi cards on the company laptop
> for years, and I run Google Earth occasionally. Never caused my X to
> freeze. I'm not saying it does not happen, but I'm just as unsure aobut
> how often it does in reality as those of you are who demand proof that
> newbies get caught out by C-A-B.
>

My current laptop has an ATI card and Google Earth freezes it up. It's
unpredictable enough that I open GE every now and then, but
predictable enough that I close everything else first.

> As far as Compiz goes, I have run that on my ATi cards, too, without
> locking X. Maybe I am lucky. However, if Compiz locks X once a week for
> a significant number of users, then it really has no business being
> enabled by default in Ubuntu.
>

Compiz doesn't actually lock up X for me, but it crashes in ways that
I cannot start Kwin or restart Compiz. I just CAB it and kdm logs me
back in automatically.

>> Because those users call _me_ on the phone when this happens. Or they post here.
>
> So, they enable it next time. What's the problem, their X is locked at
> that point, anyway, and these users are not likely to run complex CLI
> jobs that take days to complete, do they.
>

CAB is not a complex cli job that will take days to complete.

> The same argument has been used by Bart against disabling C-A-B, by the
> way: "so what if someone hits it by default, they just lost a few hours
> of work at the worst".
>
> I happen to think that having to reboot when X is locked anyway is worse
> than losing unsaved user data due to a finger slip.
>

I agree.

>> I agree to this with a point. Windows did good with C-A-D. But I
>> disagree that a finger slip will get you C-A-anything.
>
> Again, C-A-B is like 0.5 cm away from C-A-D, less on a netbook.
>

So what? C-A-D is not a valid keypress on Linux. Had C-A-B been a
valid keypress on Windows I would agree with you, but arguing that
Windows has a valid keypress that is _near_ C-A-B is ridiculous.

>> What is the
>> poor noob to do when he accidentally hits C-A-F1?
>
> 1. at this point nothing is lost yet.
>

Everything is lost. The noob cannot get back to his comfy GUI and save his work.

> 2. it's not a good argument to point out other flaws in order to make a
> particular flaw look less bad. An argument could be made that
> Canonical's desktop target users are not well-served by this either, and
> it should be an option. So take care of what you saying here :p
>

I see your point.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il

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