Graphical login

[Paul Tansom]

On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 10:51 +0100, Tony Whitmore wrote:
> Paul Tansom wrote:
> 
> > I've always been somewhat biased towards a console login and then
> > starting X manually. It seems a safer way to do things if X doesn't work
> > properly for some reason - I'm not sure whether CTRL-ALT-Fx would always
> > work if there were X issues at login (depends on the issue no doubt!).
> 
> I've never had a problem in that area. Usually if X fails to start with
> a login manager you get dumped back to the console login prompt anyway.
> But Ctrl-Alt-Fx also works when running a login manager.

Well in ideal circumstances you'd be fine. I'm basing the possibility on
the fact that recently I had a problem with my desktop (running XFCE of
course!), where the system would just lock up, no keyboard or mouse
input was accepted, so I couldn't get back to the console. Logging in
remotely showed the X rug had been pulled from under XFCE's feet, so
what was on the screen was a mere ghost of what had been running once.
The only fix was to reboot since there was nothing to kill and no way to
restart anything. Should something similar happen at the login prompt
you are done for :)

As it happens this proved to be down to adding a couple of new
partitions to my drive in some free space. My swap partition moved up a
couple of points (hda4 to hda6 or something like that), so it wasn't
being mounted by fstab. This meant that when I ran out of physical
memory something would have to be killed, and sadly this was X and
everything that depended on it - cut back on memory usage nicely
though ;)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/