F8 either rebooting or restarting X while I'm away

[Gerry Tool]

On Dec 7, 2007 2:23 PM, Mike <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Searle <steve <at> stevesearle.com> writes:
>
> > Assuming it was not a locked screen saver asking for your password (and
> > from what you have said it isn't), then this certainly *isn't* normal
> > behaviour and it is a problem.
> >
> > I would agree with others who think it may be a crashing screensaver
> > taking down the X Windows system.  I have had this in the past when I
> > have had a random selection of screen savers.  I would disable
> > screensavers and see if the problem goes away.  If it does, you can then
> > activate them one at a time until it appears.  In my experience the
> > problem is worse with 3gl cards and proprietary drivers.
>
> I can confirm this type of behaviour also. On machines running F8 with
> the KDE desktop and running gl screensavers I had one machine hang X
> completely as soon as the mouse was moved - the machine was running
> and i could ssh in, but X had crashed completely and even doing
> telinit 3 followed by telinit 5 did not restart X. This repeated at
> various random intervals.
>
> The only option I could find at that point was to reboot.
> Changing back to a non-gl screensaver gave no recurrence of this problem.
>
> It is possible others are seeing these symptoms and rebooting but not
> reporting.

Thanks to all of you for your replies.  I have just deactivated the
screensaver and will see what happens.   I do have a long list of
screensavers and have Random as the selection The problem was not a
screensaver lock, it is a restart of X putting me back to the GDM
login window.

Mikkel: Thanks for the log message post.  /var/log/messages does have
a lot of lines like

Dec  8 07:36:04 f8 gdm-binary[10911]: WARNING:
gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

which I believe is X restarting.  I did find some kernel restart lines
also, but I believe those were all from times I rebooted manually.

I am back running Gnome/GDM, after running KDE.KDM for about a month.
This behavior is just since switching environments.  Please no flame
wars about Gnome/KDE.  They both have great features.

Gerry