Re: SEUL: Text vs. X

[Kevin Forge <forgeltd@pop.netaddress.usa.net>]

jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:
> 
> >
> > 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..
> 
At last someone who sees where I'm coming from.  X will never be 
flawless for the simple reason that it is dependent on video hardware 
and I know for a fact that video hardware is often flawed.  If I use 
the settings listed in my monitors documentation to set up XF86Config 
it just won't work.  Why ?  Because the documentation is WRONG.
I have seen monitors with 1024*768@75Mhz printed in bold text on the 
box that choke at anything frequency above 72MHz at that resolution.
I have sean video cards that work well if you tell X that it is 
something else.
-- 
: "Through the firewall, out the router, down the T1, across the
: backbone, bounced from satellite, Nothing but net."