[vox-tech] simple X86 question

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Andy Campbell <atcampbell@ucdavis.edu> 
> 
> 
> > andy, don't apologize for being a newbie; it's not a crime.  the only
> > crime is to ask a question without putting a little brain (and a bit of
> > research) into it.
> 
> Thanks...
> 
> 
> > now if you do control-alt-backspace, you should be able to kill X
> > without it restarting.
> >
> that's the only maneuver I did know, but a) it didn't work and instead
> restarted the machine and

it *definitely* shouldn't have.   are you absolutely, positively *sure*
you hit control-alt-backspace and NOT control-alt-delete?  the latter
will restart the machine.  the former will kill X.

if so, please post the output of:

grep shutdown /etc/inittab

as a last idea, you may have something that switched the backspace and
delete keys, but this is an area i don't know much about.  i need to
learn keymapping better.

> b) i've read that it does not cleanly exit from the X server anyway so it
> shouldn't be routinely used
 
absolutely not.  whoever told you that is just wrong.

see "man XF86Config-4" and do a search for "Backspace".  it's a normal,
healthy part of X.

pete