[Gllug] Debian: Laptop.

Tethys tet at isengard.accucard.com
Mon Sep 15 15:14:11 UTC 2003


Doug Winter writes:

>I've never really understood the need - if you want X to start at boot,
>then run a display manager.  If you don't, don't.
>
>Why would you need to make the decision of whether to start X or not at
>boot time any more than you might want to do so for slapd or squid or
>quake-server or any other arbitrary program?

Lets say you've just bought a shiny new graphics card that isn't
supported by your existing X server setup. You put it in the machine,
and boot up. The machine tries to go into X, and due to the peculiarities
of this particular card, rather than just fail to start X, it's locks up
the machine, displaying a whole pile of bank nothingness on the screen,
and refusing to accept input from keyboard or mouse.

No, this isn't a hypothetical situation. I've had it happen. Being able
to just append a "3" to my kernel arguments to get a sane system is a
really useful thing to be able to do. Similarly, being able to boot to
run level 2 (full multiuser locally, but no network services) when your
NIS/NFS server is down is equally handy.

Tet

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug




More information about the GLLUG mailing list