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Alan McKinnon wrote: |
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> On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote: |
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> |
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>> In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing. You also need to understand |
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>> that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys. I didn't and |
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>> had to do a hard shutdown. I had to actually pull the plug to do any |
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>> good. Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I |
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>> could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen |
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>> again with no mouse or keyboard. It would be really bad if even that |
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>> didn't work with devicekit. I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never |
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>> know do we? |
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>> |
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> |
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> Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of |
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> desktop system design: |
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> |
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> As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit of |
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> what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse and |
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> display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution and |
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> the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give the |
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> user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an epic |
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> fail. |
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> |
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> Magic SysRq falls so far short of this that it's not even worth contemplating. |
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> It's useful for mega-power users and kernel devs doing really way out things, |
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> but for normal users it might as well be invisible. Sure, it's documented in |
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> /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt. Well now, I offer two comments: |
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> |
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> I doubt that kernel docs are even installed on most user-centric distros, and |
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> anyone want to present an argument why the location of that file and it's |
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> contents might be construed as being "self-evident and/or obvious"? |
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> |
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> |
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> |
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I do remember when I was using Mandrake, the kernel sources wasn't even |
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installed. I don't know if that option was even enabled in the kernel. |
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With Mandrake, they just enabled modules for everything. |
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When this happened to me, just being able to do a ctrl al backspace |
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would have been good. I did try it but it didn't work either. That |
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would at least be a good rescue in case of failure. |
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|
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Dale |
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|
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:-) :-) |
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