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

[Jason Spiro]

Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at ...> writes:

> 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.

Often it *can* fork a new client.  For example, users often use Ctrl+Alt+Bksp
as a quick way to log out, and may wonder why it doesn't work in recent
versions of Xorg.  This would give them a quick answer.

Other users might have just run "X -configure", their mouse might not be
working, and they just want to quickly kill Xorg.

> 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.   

On Solaris, killall is in /usr/sbin, not /usr/bin, but point taken:  "killall"
might be horrible advice to users of other Unixes.

> 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.

I wanted the xmessage to be concise, so I didn't mention how to send SIGTERM
first.  But if you like, you can mention it in the xmessage.  

So, in sum, now I think the xmessage should tell users:  "To terminate Xorg,
press Ctrl+Alt+F1, then log in as 'root', then enter:  pkill -n X || sleep 5s
&& pkill -9 -n X".