What to do when X freezes?

[frag79]

This has happened to me a few times. I just tried to open a file with realplayer, and it froze the whole system. The mouse cursor still moved, but I couldn't click on anything and the keyboard was unresponsive...not even ctrl+alt+backspace worked. After 5 minutes of hitting every key, I just hit the power switch. Is there any way to get out of a situation like that without turning the power off?

Mike

[ph34r]

I typically ssh in and kill the offending processes, or do a clean reboot. Of course, that requires a extra computer and a network setup, but hey, who doesn't have that? :)

[DMR]

If you're not as lucky as ph34r (ok, I have a network too, but who's counting?), and the system is totally unresponsive, then you'll have to do a hard power down :(

[miker]

if CTRL-ALT-F1 won't get you to a text console where you can shutdown in an orderly fashion ('shutdown now' works on suse as root, or you can drop to a lower init level to stop X, or you can presumably just kill X) then I suggest a little de-icer to help your frozen X

;-)