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Old 1st April 2011
RJPugh RJPugh is offline
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Default Problem closing window manager

Hello gang. I've got a strange problem, and I'm need some help figuring out exactly what I'm dealing with.

When I start BSD (PC-BSD 8.2 to be exact), I'm greeted with a graphical login screen, which soon turns me over to my window manager. Everything works fine until I try to exit my window manager. The screen turns black, flickers for a moment, then freezes. The only way to get out of this is to hit the reset button on my computer. That results in an emergency shutdown. When text returns to the screen, the last thing written is "Writing Entropy File" followed by "Terminated." The system then proceeds to close down system processes, synchronize nodes, and the like, ultimately shutting itself down. I haven't been able to so a "graceful" shutdown of BSD since installing this version.

Has anyone in here encountered something like this? If so, what exactly am I dealing with? And how do I fix it?

Thanks in advance,

RJPugh
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Old 1st April 2011
jb_daefo jb_daefo is offline
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Open an xterm, or similar.
Code:
 
top
ps
those should list processes
Code:
pkill hald
killall -HUP Xorg
Unsure if that could return you to the OS without shutdown, howsoever I'd attempt it.
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Old 2nd April 2011
RJPugh RJPugh is offline
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Thanks. I tried this, but as soon as I entered the killall command, I got the same result. That is, a frozen screen that can only be solved by doing a hard reset.

It seems like the X-session is unable to restart itself.

As an experiment, I want to try doing an old-fashioned command line login; the kind where I have to enter startx or something similar to invoke the GUI. What kind of settings should I put into etc/ttys to achieve this?

(I've never done this before, in case you haven't guessed.)

RJPugh
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Old 2nd April 2011
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rocket357 rocket357 is offline
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I assume Ctrl-Alt-Backspace locks the machine up, too?
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Old 2nd April 2011
RJPugh RJPugh is offline
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Ctrl-Alt-Backspace has no effect.

Neither does Ctrl-Alt-[Function Key].

X isn't shutting down correctly, and I want to know why. Or better yet, how to fix it. I'm currently looking into video driver issues.
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Old 2nd April 2011
shep shep is offline
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I don not know if the PC-BSD developers enabled <ctl><alt><bksp> but it is disabled by default in FreeBSD 8.2
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO.../x-config.html
Quote:
Note: In Xorg versions up to 7.3, the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination could be used to break out of Xorg. To enable it in version 7.4 and later, you can either type the following command from any X terminal emulator:

% setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

or create a keyboard configuration file for hald called x11-input.fdi and saved in the /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy directory. This file should contain the following lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
<merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

You will have to reboot your machine to force hald to read this file.

The following line will also have to be added to xorg.conf.new, in the ServerLayout or ServerFlags section:

Option "DontZap" "off"
You might want to look at the Xorg.0.log in /var/log. The system usually keeps the last 2 instances.

If you want to try to startx without the graphical login, at the graphical screen <ctl><alt>F2 which should give you a login prompt. Login and then
Quote:
startx
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Old 2nd April 2011
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rocket357 rocket357 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shep View Post
I don not know if the PC-BSD developers enabled <ctl><alt><bksp> but it is disabled by default in FreeBSD 8.2
Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
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Old 2nd April 2011
RJPugh RJPugh is offline
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First off, thanks for all your help thus far. A solution may actually be out there...

Anyway, I've added the codes for enabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, so at the very least I should be able to break out of the frozen screen without rebooting my computer.

I looked at the suggested logs, and the last several lines contained errors relating to config/hal, and a few references to keymaps in server-0.xkm. Any insights on those? That still says to be that X isn't closing down or resetting itself correctly. For whatever reason.

I suspect part of the problem, if not the root problem, is my video driver. My graphics card is a GeForce4 T1-4200 series. This is covered by the standard NVIDIA driver, but one of the legacy NVIDIA drivers specifically mentions this card. I'm now attempting to download and install the legacy driver and see if that changes anything.

But I'm looking at other options as well, just to be safe.
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Old 2nd April 2011
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When you get in a situation like this, sometimes it's helpful to enable sshd and have a session ssh'd to the troublesome machine while messing with X. If X breaks, just pkill the process from the ssh session and you're back in the driver's seat.

I've had the nv driver on OpenBSD lock the machine up like that, and this ssh trick works wonders (for debugging...I wouldn't want to do this for daily use haha)
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