[Techtalk] I've lost my prompt

[Jenny Brown (was Gable)]

Another very very useful command to know about...

control-alt-backspace      = kill xwindows, give me a shell

If XWindows is misbehaving in any way this combination will
abort it immediately and drop you back to a shell prompt in
text-only mode.  If you're still hung there, you can try
typing control-c a few times to abort what it's trying to do.

If you have more than one machine in your home, you can also
telnet in remotely and run commands as root to kill off the
hung processes.

Try to learn how to make all changes take effect without rebooting...
because the only sorts of changes that actually require a reboot
are things like having a custom kernel put in place.  There are
safe ways to test every change.

Hope this helps for the future.   --Jenny

On Sun, Jul 08, 2001 at 01:30:30PM -0400, Glen Strom wrote:
> Now, to active the aliases, I reboot (I don't know how to do it the 
> right way). Kdm starts up. I type in my password.
> Nothing happens. X has hung. I open a console and try to log in as 
> root. There's no prompt. I can type in commands, but nothing 
> happens.