Constructive critisism; room for improvement:

[Jim]

Andy Pieters wrote:

>HI all
>
>I am a huge fan of Linux and Fedora in particular.  I just bought another low 
>budget pc with windows xp on so I could test how my software (php/xml) looks 
>on internet explorer.  Again it filled me with joy that I switched to Linux 
>almost a year ago, for that windows box BSODed on me within the first fifteen 
>minutes! (actually while trying to uninstall AOL) (BSOD=Blue Screen of Death 
>= Kernel Error)
>
>Still, one thing that windows handles well are bad cd's.  When a cd fails, the 
>whole os doesn't come crashing down.  I was just ripping the cd Europe 
>1982-1992 on my Linux box and listening to my collection with amaroK.  
>Suddenly the system got in an endless loop.  The 5 seconds of music in the 
>play buffer were repeated over and over again.  I ejected the cd but that 
>didn't save the system.  I tried also to ssh in but that wasn't possible 
>either.  It didn't respond to pusing the poweroff button and the only 
>solution was forced power off.
>
>With kind regards
>
>
>Andy
>  
>
Andy: I have had this exact same issue happen to me on 3 different 
occasions. I have not yet been able to reliably duplicate the problem.  
What I have discovered is that it appears that X is not responding to 
input. What I did each time was to exit X by pressing and holding down 
Control and ALT then pressing the Backspace key. This will tell X to 
exit gracefully and so far it has worked for me every time this has 
happened. I have my firewall set to block everything so I don't know if 
I would have been able to ssh in or not.

Try that if it locks up on you again and see if that at least allows you 
to regain control of the system.

Jim