[TriLUG] recovering from X crash

[Matthew Lavigne]

Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> yes.
>
> the machine of interest is busy typing this right now, so I tried it 
> on another machine sitting in console mode. I came in from a remote 
> machine in an xterm. At the console machine's prompt, I typed `startx` 
> and the console machine's monitor leapt into X, with all the startx 
> stdout being displayed on the remote machine. I didn't know you could 
> do that - I've never ran startx from anywhere but the console before. 
> I had assumed with DISPLAY etc not set that the machine running startx 
> wouldn't know where to display. I guess I need to look into which 
> machine is the X server and which one is the client and which one 
> looks for DISPLAY etc. I've never been able to keep that straight.
>
> Neato. I'm ready for next sunday morning.
>
> The problem I was really trying to solve was how to get the login 
> prompt back on the machine with X crashed and have that machine 
> running in console mode. Do you know how to do that?
>
> Thanks
>
> Joe

Joe,

Another question is what video are you running?  I am guessing that it 
is probably not the binary only driver for Nvidia or ATI but I wanted to 
clarify.

What you may need to do is a ps -ef |grep mingetty which will give you 
the PID/tty that each is running on.  Kill one of the PID and see if the 
tty respawns. Additionally the problem may be that it is running in 
Frambuffer mode (if you have rhgb or something like that in the grub 
kernel line.  If so then you can try to remove that, it takes away the 
pretty graphical boot but it may give you the keyboard and mouse back.  
I am thinking that when X dies at that level that it may affect the 
kernel framebuffer which is what the graphical boot runs on. 

Let us know how it goes.

Matthew Lavigne