System crash

[James Green <gnome cyberstorm demon co uk>]

Hello,

Not sure who to blame (read: report bug to), but something just made my
Linux box to cower in a dark corner and force me hit to the case's Reset
button before it responded. The story goes:

Installed (not upgraded) RH6. Ripped out the RPMs of Glib/GTK and so
forth, compiled and installed the latest tarballs. This included Gnome and
Enlightenment

So I'm in E/Gnome, compiling Gtk--, and decide to go for another
wallpaper. So I enter into E's configuration app and select a new one. I
close it down, but think, nah, I'll choose a better one, so I repeat the
process, only this time Clicking Done on the Image to go back into the
mail Econf background selection area, something goes ascew; my mouse
reponds once every few seconds (nothing new here), my hard drive is
trashing about, my screen has frozen (even the click was no longer
clicking), and lastly my numlock key no longer turned the light on/off.

Then everything goes dead. No disk activity, then it starts, stops, and
starts again. Then my screen goes blank, and the main login prompt pops
up, as if I'd logged out. Then the PAM module pops up and tries to start
X, only X won't start, it merely flashes on my screen and exists
immediately. The disk is now trashing around again.

Anyway, I figure X or something has majorly crashed, and PAM thinks, hmm,
better restart that. Also, Gtk-- hasn't finished and is continuing. OK I
think, I'll take a shower.

When I return, the disk is no longer going, but X is still trying to
restart. No keyboard response to CTRL-ALT-DEL or Backspace, so I'm left
with no option but to manually reset.

Linux survived, curtesy of something fixing a load of inodes upon startup;
my E-term started this X, as did the E conf, but with the capplets shaded
and dead (restarting the conf fixed this). My background has now changed,
but I'll no longer be doing it while compiling ;-)

Now, who's department is responsible for this? They owe me a beer ;)


Still, it could have been worse - it could have been under Windows.

-- 
James Green
http://www.cyberstorm.demon.co.uk/
Home of the demon.tech.modems 56k FAQ.