Console peaced out?

[Jim Maul]

tom pollerman wrote:
> On Friday 17 December 2004 15:26, Jim Maul wrote:
> 
>>I am running rh9 on a couple machines at work here.  While i was out
>>sick one day a co-worker logged into one of the machines and did loaded
>>up xwindows (startx).  I (and him) have done this many times in the past
>>without a problem but for some reason when he did it this time, he said
>>that xwindows started loading but then the screen went black and that
>>was it.  I originally thought it might be something with the display
>>settings being out of range for the monitor but it appears that is not
>>the problem.  The machine responds fine (to ping and such) and i can get
>>into it through ssh without and problems but the console appears to be
>>hosed.  The keyboard is unresponsive (i cant even get the numlock light
>>to come on) and the screen is just sitting there black.  It is not a
>>problem with the monitor or anything as i have swapped that out.
>>
>>I tried killing his session to see if it would log him out and return
>>the console to a prompt but that did not happen.  The session ended as
>>it not longer is displayed in top or who but still the console remains
>>black and the keyboard is unresponsive.
>>
>>Is there something that i can kill or run to be able to get the console
>>back?  This machine usually goes 8-10 months before something comes up
>>where it needs to be rebooted and i REALLY dont want to have to reboot
>>it now.  Its serving quite a lot for us here.  And yes, i know you
>>shouldnt really be running x on a console of a server but hey, he did
>>and now its hosed and i gotta deal with it.
>>
>>Does anyone have any ideas or perhaps more info is needed?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>-Jim
> 
> 
>   Sometimes when your terminal is behaving strangely, you can try to reset it 
> to a "reasonable" set of default settings by 'blindly' typing  the command:
> 
>                   stty sane <enter>
> 
> or:
> 
>                CTRL-J
>                stty sane
>                CTRL-J
> 
> (CTRL-J is interpreted as a carriage-return, in case <enter> is also 
> unresponsive)
> 

Just a followup to my problem here...

The above suggestion did not help but after a reboot, the machine came 
back up just fine.  I tried running startx again and the same problem 
happened.  Just before it starts to load kde (i see the X mouse pointer 
for about 3 or 4 seconds) then the screen goes black.  I tried running 
this as different users all with the same results.  I tried running 
xFree86 -configure in case the x config file was corrupted but when 
using the new config file, x loaded and must have been using a value 
that was too high for my monitor cause i could see graphics but they 
were very distorted and scrolling up the screen.  a quick 
ctrl-alt-backspace brought me back to the command line so this was 
atleast a little better than before because now i could atleast get back 
to the prompt.  after doing "switchdesk twm" to try a differnt window 
manager it just suddenly started working.  The weird thing is that it 
didnt load twm..it loaded kde like it always did.  This is very weird 
indeed.

So to make a long story short, its working now, but i have NO idea why.

Thanks for the responses.

-Jim