[Discuss] On rebooting, Linux, Emacs, etc.

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

> It's not a bad practice to reboot whenever you change a system, whether
> this is configuration changes or OS updates, in order to test those
> changes.

More subtly, until you reboot, kernels and non-terminating processes
will still be the old code, so you haven't fully updated your operating
environment.  That's especially significant for security fixes.

> I don't like to reboot because I have stuff in progress. Such as an 
> emacs session with lots of buffers open.

There are Emacs add-ons that keep track of what files are in buffers,
etc.  Really, you shouldn't have anything "live" on your computer that
you can't reconstruct quickly because your system could crash at any
moment.  People are less aware of this now (having Linux run for 100
days continuously is common, as opposed to early Windows, which would
crash every day), but it's still a risk.

> That said, I kill my web browser frequently, which reverts it to the 
> same starting state each time, removing all history and cookies and 
> storred who-knows-what. I suspect most people would find their browser 
> tabs the hardest part about doing a reboot.

I use Firefox.  Killing it does *not* remove history, cookies, or
cache, you have to do that explicitly.  OTOH, if you have it configured
correctly, it doesn't loose the tab/window configuration either.
Conveniently, I can clear the cookies without losing the tabs/windows.

> When I was an undergrad, Emacs was considered huge, a burden to the 
> multi-user Sun workstations in the computer lab. Today, compared to a 
> web browser, Emacs is tight and efficient!

I know a guy who back in the Sun workstation days disdained Emacs (he
used Micro-Emacs) because it sucked up 5 *megs* on the disk!  And that
was a reasonable complaint in those days.

Dale