On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, CND OConnor wrote: > Hi, > > I've used linux quite a while now, but every so often I do something to > my system I can't fix that I know will go away if I reboot. I'm lazy, I > guess, so I do. I can always make some tea. Its very silly though I'm > sure I needn't, so can someone suggest what to do when, > > 1) you 'cat' a file you shouldn't in the console mode. before you know > it everything on the commandline becomes an unreadable mess of ascii > characters you didn't know you had.
Don't do that :) - seriously, I don't know a good answer for this one but I'm sure there is one. > > 2) X crashes (hasn't for a while actually) and dumps you in a grey > screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else. (That would be running > unstable, helix-gnome, enlightenment and gdm with mozilla to crash it). > I've tried restarting the gdm daemon but that doesn't work. > gdm wouldn't do it. Try ctrl-alt-backspace to kill the X server; if you're running xdm you'll end up back at the login screen, if you're not you'll end up back at the console. IF that doesn't work, try ctrl-alt-F1 (or actually Fanything-other-than-7) to get a console and kill the X server manually. Andy Perrin
