Recovering from a hard X lock up

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 10:39 +0100, James Allsopp wrote:
> Hi,
> My Fedora 10 machine locks up X completely, but I can still login via
> SSH. The monitor still shows the X window, but nothing changes, no
> clock, mouse nothing. X processes are still running, but not sure how to
> go about shutting them down. Last night, I tried to get the system to
> shut down sanely by running shutdown -h now and although the command ran
> and I couldn't login via ssh anymore, the machine did not shut down.
> 
> Can anyone tell me how to shutdown and restart X properly. Tried things
> like startx( had a x lock file exists error) and init 3, but nothing worked.

You may have a video driver lockup, but you don't say what your hardware
is, nor do you say if the problem occurs randomly or if it's caused by
some specific action on your part. If indeed it's a driver lockup, you
basically have to restart the machine. This happens to me on F11 when
trying to use 3D apps (mouse moves but nothing else works). My video is
Intel onboard, 64-bit, see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510948 (just an example,
your problem may be different).

poc