Constructive critisism; room for improvement:

[Jeff Vian]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 12:03 -0400, Jim wrote:
> 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
This has been mentioned here on the list, and the one thing I have seen
repeated is the copy-protection theme.

The fix has been to avoid copy-protected CDs.  Works every time.  Any CD
that trashes my PC will quickly become part of the land fill after I
complain to the vendor and make him take it back and give me a different
one. They often don't even play in a standard CD player, which is what
triggers the replacement with a different one.