Re: defective GTK app crashes gnome

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

> i've had several problems with X freezing up because of some
> misbehaviour from some graphical app. The keyboard is locked so
> it's hopeless to try CTRL+ALT+BKSP

Not wrong there...  Not even switching consoles is possible time times...


> > When the system locks up, is the computer still alive? Can you
> > ssh into it

I run a few little bits and pieces, like masquerading for my wife's computer, a server or two, etc.  And they 
all continue to run just fine.  Only X and its input devices (keyboard, mouse, and probably whatever else) 
are locked up.


> that's the problem: most desktop Linux users can't ssh login from
> another machine into the problematic one...  So, Linux is
> rock-solid stable, but you should have ssh-server running
> and a spare client machine for eventual problems with graphical
> apps... :)

Or...  Have the SysRq magic key active.  I've found it increadibly helpful in such situations, allowing me to 
force the keyboard into cooked mode, where the console-switching keys (Ctrl-Fn) will work.  You're then free 
to swap to a text console and kill X.  Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to be able to recover X -- just 
killing the application doesn't seem to help things a whole lot.


> I don't even know the relevancy of this to this list, since it's
> unlikely to be a GTK problem... 

I've managed to trash X while playing with widgets that use grabs...  I don't know if that's the whole story, 
but that accounts for most of the occasions when it's happened to me.  So I'm guessing it's possible to cause 
such a situation with GTK, and hence at least some glimmer of on-topic-ness.  ;)


Fredderic

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