Cures for 6.4.4 Video Crashes & Snags, Final Edition

[FlameWeasel]

Considering your number of posts,
I thought maybe you thought you weren't welcome.

Well, I thought I'd try replying through a "notification", but the board says you cannot receive them, so I guess I'll write publicly.

I appreciate the thought. It's not exactly that, though, but close. I've used the Knoppix forum on and off for far longer than this account has existed; I don't remember what my previous accounts were here, but I started using Knoppix, and participating here, in early 2004. (Shortly thereafter, I built a new computer and had to switch to Morphix, because Klaus refused to put the "unfree" NVidia video drivers into Knoppix, but still visited here occasionally, and then I moved to a place without internet for a while, and then moved back to civilization, and so on and so forth. You get the idea. Anyway.)

There are two reasons I don't hang around here much. First, because I really have very little to contribute. My technical knowledge of Linux is not high, and the questions here are mostly about Knoppix or Linux configuration. If someone wanted to know about C++ programming or scripting, which were my areas, they probably wouldn't be asking here.

The second reason is, because I almost never get an answer here. Perhaps the forum is simply too dead. Usually, either no one responds, or I get some smart-ass nonsense about "you must prove to us that your computer is flawless, your optical disk was burned perfectly, and that you have recently brushed your teeth before we will condescend to think about the problem that you claim to have experienced but that we do not believe really exists." Why bother, no one is going to answer anyway.

Tonight I fixed a problem that I have asked about, and I believe seen asked, repeatedly. Knoppix has a tendency to blow up the X11 server due to memory leaks. This was why I hated Compiz -- it's so leaky that it causes crashes frequently. When that happens, Knoppix simply kills all the processes and shuts down, with no possibility of recovering data that is on the ramdisk.

It's a stupid design, and if I were dictator, Klaus would be shot for it. Well, ok, maybe thrown into the scorpion pit instead. "Dipl.Ing." my hairy ass, this would be unacceptable from a first-year programming student.

I had managed to track down where the X11 server was started from, and I changed the script so that it was in a forever loop. That usually works -- the X11 server dies horribly, then my loop restarts it. About 80% of the time, I could now save my data.

But sometimes the crash is because cached code pages got corrupted somehow, and when that happens, the X11 server crashes again as soon as it restarts -- an infinite loop of crashes. Other times, I'm not sure what happens, but the machine simply freezes up; it seems like the machine has gone down to a text console in the background, but graphics mode is still set, and nothing works to view the text console. Maybe the keyboard is still in raw mode, or something. I don't know. Nothing that I've tried has worked, not even the so-called "magic sysreq" -- at best, that will sometimes cause the machine to shut down the rest of the way, which is incredibly irritating. I don't want to shut it down, I want to save my unsaved data.

Well, you know what? My laptop still responds to the power button even when everything else has crashed -- it won't actually shut off, I have to rip the battery out of the back to accomplish that, but the disk access light goes on when I push the power button, so SOMETHING still happens.

So, by changing the "powerbtn.sh" script, I came up with a way to save the data. The laptop has a hard drive, and the script now forces all data from the Desktop directory over to a directory on that drive. X11 just crashed about 20 minutes ago on my machine, and so I was able to do a real-world test, and it worked. I have no idea if it will work every time, but at least it's SOMETHING. Tonight, it saved several hours of writing for a class paper due on Monday.

So, I'm back here to post it. Maybe it'll save someone else's data. Maybe Klaus will fix the startx script so that people can save their data manually. Maybe pigs will fly. Most likely, it'll disappear without a trace, but at least I'll have tried.

Thanks again for the Compiz fix. It's extremely useful to me -- I think it's the first time in a few years that I've gotten a useful answer off Knoppix.net. I appreciate it a LOT, and I appreciate your note above.