Idea: When users press Ctrl+Alt+Bksp, tell them the new way to kill Xorg

Alan Coopersmith Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM
Fri Dec 4 09:19:32 PST 2009


Jason Spiro wrote:
> I do hope that Xorg will implement my idea.  If they do, more users will realize
> that killing X using the shell is an easy alternative, and so less users will
> continue to request that Ctrl+Alt+Bksp should be on by default.

The X server has no way of displaying a message to users.   It could possibly
log a message to Xorg.0.log which some may see, but probably not many.   If it's
in a state in which the user needs to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it, then
it's probably not going to be able to fork a new client and have the window
manager place it and map it.

Even if it could, the instructions you suggested are wrong, and not portable
to all platforms running Xorg.   For instance, on Solaris, "killall" literally
means "kill *all* processes" - not all matching a certain name, but every single
process on the system, as part of a shutdown.   "pkill" is the command to kill
processes by name.   Even on Linux, I wouldn't advise kill -9 unless other
signals have already failed, since that prevents the X server from resetting the
hardware to a safe state when it exits.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering



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