Re: getting back into X

[Derek Simkowiak <dereks kd-dev com>]

> So I did a Ctrl Alt 1 to get to a console and login that way and kill the
> offending process.

	That was a smart thing to do.  Hitting ALT-F1 through ALT-F6 will
give you another text-mode "virtual terminal", numbered 1 through 6, what
you have referred to above as a "console".  If you're in X, you need to
hit CTRL-ALT (as you obviously know).

	What you didn't know is that X runs on virtual terminal 7, so
hitting ALT-F7 would have taken you back to X (and Gnome).

> I couldn't figure out a way to then logout and then get back into my Gnome
> GUI session. I settled for a reboot rather than just turning the machine
> off or somthing equally as stupid.

	Unless you are running with X starting automatically (called
"runlevel 5"), you could have simply killed X.  In Unix, The GUI ("X") is
not directly tied to the O.S.  (It isn't really in MS-Windows, either, but
that's another topic...:)  So you could have done "killall X" followed by
a new "startx".

	Of course, ALT-F7 is what you wanted.

> Now the question is: is there a way of getting back into my GUI session?
> Or is how I would up doing it the way I should do it?

	The only time you should ever need to reboot your sytem is if you
have a hardware problem.  Sometimes Quake will freeze up my 3Dfx card, and
I need to telnet in from another computer to reboot my system--but that's
it.

	Here's one of my servers:

[dereks@internal dereks]$ uptime
  2:15pm  up 268 days, 18:11,  2 users,  load average: 0.14, 0.03, 0.01

	...and the last reboot was because of a block-wide power failure
caused by construction.  If it weren't for that, the uptime would be well
over a year.

	Of course, if you are using runlevel 5 it's another story.  A
simple mouse problem can force a hard boot if you can't get to a VT
(because X keeps restarting in an endless loop).  That's why I think it's
*incredibly bad* to have that little "Would you like to start X
automatically when you start your computer?" dialog in Xconfigurator.  NO!


--Derek