accessing shell when gnome locks up.

[Andras Simon]

On 2/27/07, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tim wrote:
> > Tim:
> >>>> What are you going to do when serial ports disappear from motherboards?
> >
> > Chris Mohler:
> >>> Weep!
> >
> > Andras Simon:
> >> No! Curse! Much more efficient! :-)
> >>
> >> Or, as a last resort, get a usb->serial port converter.
> >>
> >> BTW, I'm only advocating this approach, not using it myself. I don't
> >> remember having a lockup since I last tried to use NVidia's driver.
> >> But then I'm not using Gnome or KDE, just a trusty old fvwm (1.24r).
> >
> > I was serious in asking it.  While I haven't done the serial console
> > trick, I see the purpose of it, and the need to be able to do such
> > things.  I don't know if a USB-serial doodah would be useful in the
> > situations where you might use a serial console, you mightn't have
> > anything available to drive it.
>
> These days you'd be much more likely to have another computer or laptop
>   with an ethernet connector available than a serial terminal or cable
> with the right-sized, right-gender ends.  If you don't have a hub, use a
> crossover ethernet cable to connect and use ssh.  Or get wireless
> working and forget about all that nonsense.

If you regularly need to have access to your computer over the
network, then you already have sshd running on it, and you have no
problem to solve. But I'd hate (read: wouldn't know how to do it
securely, in a finite amount of time) to open up a port and run sshd
just to be able to log in remotely once in a blue moon to kill some
stupid gnome thingy. The serial approach is relatively simple and you
don't have to worry about future security holes discovered in the
tcp/ip stack, iptables and sshd.

Andras