[Nottingham] What happened to my kernel?

[Roger Light]

Hi Dan,

> It was just coming to an end when the screen saver
> kicked in. That's annoying. I want to see what's
> happening, so I gave the mouse a wiggle to get back to
> the desktop... but the screen saver just froze. Hmmm.
> Well, it might still be doing it's thing in the
> background. Better leave it a few minutes and see if
> anything's happened. Nope. (Bear in mind that this is
> late at night and I really should be sleeping) Well,
> what else can I do but switch the machine off and boot
> up again?

Something to try in this situation is to get out of X. The first thing
to try is Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or F2-F6). This will (hopefully) swap you over
to a console window which you can log into and then say kill the
screensaver or whatever is causing the problem. At the very least you
should be able to see what is going on with "top". If Ctrl-Alt-F1
doesn't work, the other option is to try Ctrl-Alt-Backspace which will
try and kill X. Not exactly a recommended action as it would still
potentially mess with the upgrade progress, but it would at least give
you the option of shutting down properly.

Cheers,

Roger