The new cool laptop work really great except when it completely hangs. The mouse pointer moves, but you can't flip consoles with Ctrl+Alt+Fx and clicking or typing doesn't make anything happen.
it's happened less than a handful of times in a couple of weeks' use, and I've generally just cold rebooted it, but this time a document someone had worked on for an hour was open and not saved.
So i logged in from another computer. Maybe suspending it would reset the screen and inputs? Nope. It just woke up to the stuck state. Of interesting note is that suspending took like half a minute, while usually it's instant.
Ok, so how about flipping ttys? When you move from one console to the other, X often seems to be redrawing itself, so maybe something is reset when you flip screens. Can I do it from the command line?
Yep, there's a command
it's happened less than a handful of times in a couple of weeks' use, and I've generally just cold rebooted it, but this time a document someone had worked on for an hour was open and not saved.
So i logged in from another computer. Maybe suspending it would reset the screen and inputs? Nope. It just woke up to the stuck state. Of interesting note is that suspending took like half a minute, while usually it's instant.
Ok, so how about flipping ttys? When you move from one console to the other, X often seems to be redrawing itself, so maybe something is reset when you flip screens. Can I do it from the command line?
Yep, there's a command
chvt! So I just chvt 1 and wait. And wait.
Thank you for the reminder though. The hotkey for killing X is unconfigured in modern default configurations, but I'll add it to my user configuration at least, as it might be useful for less severe situations than this one.
What I should have tried instead of rebooting, once I had given up trying to revive the running session, would have been to kill just the X+GNOME session rather than the whole OS. It would have been interesting to see if that would have worked.