[ale] killing X

[David S. Jackson]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 12:54:57AM -0400 Robert E. Karaffa, II <rkaraff at emory.edu> wrote:
> on rare occasions, X dies on my Mandrake box, usually at logout, so that I
> see a black screen with a stuck mouse arrow in the middle.  the console is
> dead (no tty access), so I'm powerless to access the box except remotely,

I've seen this with nvidia drivers, for example, where something
running with a high permission leaves the keyboard and display
hung up because it doesn't terminate cleanly.

I've never used Mandrake, but as root you might try a killall
xinit {xdm,X,whatever_is_right_for_Mandrake}, and see if any
errors appear on stderr.  Top could help here with the PID.
There might be an XFree86.log or XF86Error.log or somesuch on the
system you could check out.  

I wouldn't be surprised if you find that your loading some X
modules that don't play nicely with your hardware.  You might
peek at the xdm startup script (or whatever Mandrake uses) and
see if X is invoked with a log file; if not, perhaps you could
add a line to log errors to /var/log/XErrors.log or something.


-- 
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City
in order to be unhappy.  -- Groucho Marx
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