On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:46:27 +0200 "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> me hands over the 'killing it slowly monsterbug-debug-award' to david For my next trick.. Although it doesn't happen often, it is occasionally annoyingly time consuming to have to reboot my computer when the keyboard freezes shortly after entranced starts up. I have discussed this with, er, one of the developers I think, I can't remember who, and grepping my IRC logs can't find it. At any rate, it is possibly not entrances fault. On the other hand, I have never seen it happen to other display managers. The problem - When starting entranced at boot time, the keyboard will sometimes freeze, which means you can't type a password, or switch to a VT, or anything useful. The only option is to use the mouse to hit the reboot button, unless you have a nearby box handy you could use to ssh into the frozen box. The freeze doesn't always happen straight away, but if it will happen, it will happen in a minute of entranced starting, and usually within a few seconds. The freeze only hits me often enough to be slightly annoying. This problem has other quirks that I won't go into right now. This one will be a real bitch to track down, as not only is there no clue about where to look, and is hard to reproduce, but it requires constant rebooting. Rebooting my main box takes minutes, and i won't even mention how long the P100 takes to boot. On the other hand, I am developing My Linux, which has been specifically optimised to boot fast. On the gripping hand, My Linux is waiting for the official release of the modular Xorg tree before I add X to it. Should happen any day now. Oh, and E17 will be it's official window manager, so I will need to fix or workaround this as distro maintainer anyway. Without actually looking at the code, and just off the top of my head, I have a plan of attack. Instrument the source so that it is logging the flow through the code. Add a "Frozen keyboard" button to the login screen. Set a "First login" flag. At first login, if the user can type a password and login, the keyboard is not frozen, so write the log to the "it worked" logging directory, and turn off the logging. If the keyboard freezes, hit the "Frozen keyboard" button with the mouse, this writes the log to the "it froze" logging directory. Compare logs, add more instrumentation, rinse and repeat. This lets me track the problem, without having to spend the day rebooting. It will take a long time though. I have yet to install entranced on my P100, but I should, and whenever I have a spare moment, just reboot it and test the keyboard. I have to go and work for my bandwidth now, so I won't even start this process yet.
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