[vox-tech] Re: Part Way Into X

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Ken Bloom <kabloom@ucdavis.edu> 
> I think you missed something.

it's always good to get a 3rd perspective on things.

> He said the pattern he saw on his monitor
> was moving, and that is *definitely* not normal.

it can be explained by a whole host of non-error situations.  could be
the video timings aren't correct.  we don't know what version of X he's
running.  there might be a non-VESA timing in his config file.

> I speculate that he
> doesn't have a ~/.xinitrc or a ~/.xsession, and so he has gotten the
> checkerboarded default X screen, with an xterm in the upper-left corner.
> (see `man xinit`)
 
i think this was already surmised.

> Because of a misconfiguration in his XF86Config or his XF86Config-4, his
> monitors scan is not synchronized with his monitor signal, hence we get
> a scrolling rainbowish mess of the scene that he should be seeing which
> I described above.

to be honest, i don't understand what you're saying here.

what exactly do you mean by "monitor signal"?  communication between the
monitor and video card isn't synchronous in the sense that there aren't
"flow control signals".

> As for the ctrl-alt-backspace problem he described, I don't know what
> causes it, but I do know that when the RedHat 7.1 machines in the ECS
> labs are functioning *properly* they don't allow ctrl-alt-backspace, and
> so I can't use ctrl-alt-backspace to log out users that have
> disappeared, leaving their computers logged-in and locked.

see "man XF86Config-4".  look for the string "Ctrl+Alt+Backspace"

> The problem with the FTP server I am at a loss to explain.

the X thing wasn't really explained either.  anyone can write a new init
file (and we don't even know if that would work).  the question is what
happened to the old file?

files don't disappear by themselves.  at least, they shouldn't.

pete