Re: SEUL: Text vs. X

[Kevin Forge <forgeltd@pop.netaddress.usa.net>]

DAVID B. TEAGUE wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> If the SEUuser always wants X, then make dead certain that the loop of
> deat is never encountered. Some xdm maintainer (preferably the original,
> top of the stream maintainer) should patch that program. I consider this
> a bug, regardless of who is using the system.
> 
I don't care what it is.  It just shuldn't be alowed.
>
> The scenario that Orn mentions here is the horror situtation that is my
> reason for ALWAYS booting in to a text mode display THEN changing to X
> when I _NEED_ to have a grapical display.  (Heck, I have my M$ windows
> machines boot into DOS then run WIN.
> 
Lot's of people do this.  Back in Win3.11 days we had the option of 
booting to a command line or putting "win" in your autoexec.bat.  
Few people did the later and nobody ever considered it hard to type
a 3 letter word to "get into the system".   Hell, the username 
+ password is longer than that and nobody has proposed getting rid 
of it.  What would be nice is to create a simlink from startx to 
win.  Just for fun :)
Now that I think about it some of the worst Win3.11 problems happened 
when Windows was screwed up and the machine insisted on starting it
anyway.  The user often knew just what to do to fix it ( she set the
resolution to 1024*768 so she can set it back ), but had trouble 
getting to a command line.  This means 3 or 4 hard reboots with all
the disk corruption that goes with that.  For Linux this shouldn't be 
an issue.  
Some things are <IMHO> too close to impossible for us to hang our hopes
on them being accomplished.  1, Is an unbreakable GUI.
It may be possible, but I wouldn't want SEUL to depend on it. 
>
> BTW - excuse my ignorance -- what is a 'menu shell' ?
> 
> --David     (teague@wcu.edu, dbt@elentari.cs.wcu.edu)
> 
> Ask me how software patents and user interface copyrights make
> programming a dangerous business.  Revitalize the The League for
> ProgrammingFreedom
> 
> On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Orn E. Hansen wrote:
> 
> >
> > Þann 14-Feb-98 skrifar Donovan Rebbechi:
> > >
> > > Very true. But there comes a point where they need to know something (for
> > > example, how to turn their machine on.) The point is that if they get
> > > caught in the 'loop of Death', they should know how to hit C-M-F1 to get
> > > out of the loop and into the shell.
> > >
> >   Pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 doesn't work to get out of the 'loop of death'.  When
> > the X server restarts, it grabs the console... it's the way to solve the
> > problem where the resolution is unreadable.  The only way to catch the loop
> > of death, is to patch XDM... it could be made to start your menu shell when
> > it discovers that X is stopping with an error (by peeking into the X servers
> > log file, for instance... or discovering it's being respawned to often within
> > some given period of time).  Here, your menu shell would come in very handy,
> > to help the user solve the problem.  And, when the user exits from it, then
> > XDM could continue the same process, or die.  Depending on wether the user
> > found out the problem and solved it, or disconfigured XDM.
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Orn Einar Hansen                         oe.hansen@oehansen.pp.se
> >                                           oehansen@daimi.aau.dk
> >                                         voice+fax; +46 035 217194

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