I crashed Linux

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Mark J. Dulcey writes:
| Ron Peterson wrote:
| > I crashed Linux.  ...
|
| I've had cases where the console goes completely dead (you can't
| see anything on the screen, and the keyboard won't work), but
| Linux STILL hasn't crashed - just the console code. Did you try
| using telnet to get into the box? (It hasn't happened to me for a
| long time, by the way.)

This sort of thing happened to me just a few days ago.  I was sitting
there  working, when suddenly the mouse's connector came loose on the
back of the box.  I saw it happen out of the corner of my  eye.   The
system  was instantly unusable, and plugging the mouse back in had no
effect.  The keyboard didn't work; CTRL-ALT-F keys wouldn't switch to
another  screen;  nothing  had any effect.  I could see from the fact
that several windows  were  still  changing  that  X  was  alive  and
processes  were  running,  but there was no way to get any input into
the system.  Saying "Hey, the system didn't crash" is sorta facetious
in such situations, IMO.

I did try  a  telnet  from  another  machine,  and  even  killed  off
everything with 'X' in its name, but it was all to no avail. The only
way I found to make the screen/keyboard/mouse combo work again was  a
full reboot.

This did sorta piss me off.  Yeah, the system hadn't crashed.   Lotta
consolation  that  was.   Wish there were some way to fix it short of
killing everything I was working on and starting over.  I did a bunch
of digging through TFM, but didn't find any clues.

Too bad the keyboard and mouse cables never have those little  screws
like  the  monitor  has  that  prevents fallout.  Of course, the real
idiocy here is that plugging the mouse back in didn't make  it  start
working again. I'd guess that's probably a hardward idiocy, though it
is probably exacerbated by some matching software idiocy.

On my machine at work, the usual reason for reboots is that  netscape
has  grabbed the focus with a popup window, and then goes into zombie
mode. Sometimes if you wait a while, it crashes and then you get your
screen back, minus the netscape windows. But when this doesn't happen
after a few minutes, the only way to get your productivity back is to
reboot. This happens several times a week, giving up times comparable
to a Windows box.

(I suppose one could quibble about using the terms "productivity" and
"netscape" in the same paragraph.  ;-)

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