Re: SEUL: Text vs. X

[jfm2@club-internet.fr]

> 
> Þann 14-Feb-98 skrifar Donovan Rebbechi:
> > 
> > Very true. But there comes a point where they need to know something (for
> > example, how to turn their machine on.) The point is that if they get
> > caught in the 'loop of Death', they should know how to hit C-M-F1 to get
> > out of the loop and into the shell. 
> > 
>   Pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 doesn't work to get out of the 'loop of death'.  When
> the X server restarts, it grabs the console... it's the way to solve the
> problem where the resolution is unreadable.  The only way to catch the loop
> of death, is to patch XDM... it could be made to start your menu shell when
> it discovers that X is stopping with an error (by peeking into the X servers
> log file, for instance... or discovering it's being respawned to often within
> some given period of time).  Here, your menu shell would come in very handy,
> to help the user solve the problem.  And, when the user exits from it, then
> XDM could continue the same process, or die.  Depending on wether the user
> found out the problem and solved it, or disconfigured XDM.
> 

Pressing CTRL-ALT-F1 will not get you out of the loop of death but it
will avoid you frying your monitor.  Until we can assume than X will
work out of the box (not in a long time) putting people in XDM without
having given the user the opportunity to verify than it works is not
the way to go.  I really don't see what is wrong in having the user
start X manually once in his life.

Windows detects problems when the user does a CTRL-ALT-DEL just after
boot, in that case it enters failsafe mode.

Unless than you can provide an analogous mechanism (difficult because
X grabs keyboard) stiop dreaming about an all XDM distribution.  For
now X has no mechanism to know if the monitor is displaying correctly.

Also try to think what happens if user changes video card and you drop
into XDM..

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

"For drinking muddy water if that is the water of truth,
            for that the camel is needed"