How to restart X
Nifty Hat Mitch
mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Tue Jul 27 17:51:17 UTC 2004
On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 10:23:33AM -0500, Erik Volkman wrote:
> Reply-To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
>
> I feel really silly asking how to do this, but I can't figure out
> the Redhat/Fedora way of doing this. In debian if I want to restart
> X from the console I can do a /etc/init.d/(x|k|g|w)dm
> restart. What's the equivalent in Redhat/Fedora? I'm not seeing
> anything in /etc/init.d or in service --status-all that appears to
> be what I want, and doing an init 3; init 5, seems like overkill.
Yes the pair of init 3; init 5 is overkill.
If you look at the set of /etc/inittab lines that have both
init 3 and init 5 in them you will see a longer list of
things than just X. So changing initstate is overkill as
you noted.
What you are looking for is the specific lines and processes that sets
run level 3 apart from run level 5. Looking at:
diff -d /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/
and the contents of inittab I only see one critical line
in inittab.
# Run xdm in runlevel 5
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon
Since this line is marked "respawn" all you need to do is kill the
active window manager parent process so that init notices and restarts
the window manager.
The /etc/X11/prefdm script and the scripts and binaries it
plays with are worth looking at.
So scan /etc/X11/prefdm, note that it can start one of three window
managers. Look for the one of the three window managers and kill it. I
would prefer to kill the primary process but a dull killall approach
should also work. If you have only one window manager, something like
this:
First look...
ps -efl | egrep "kdm|gdm|xdm"
Now you can terminate the process (see also kill).
killall kdm gdm xdm
And check the result...
ps -efl | egrep "kdm|gdm|xdm"
A control-alt-backspace kills the current window manager unless
that key sequence trap is turned off. That however depends on X.
If X is well enough to do this then why are we killing X.
I doubt that xfs needs restarting. Still, the X-font server (xfs)
might need some attention as X depends on it.
In some cases there could be a hardware driver lockup/ or other driver
issue that this might not clear up.
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
/dev/dull where insight begins.
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