[Sussex] Cursor Disappearing

[Geoff Teale]

Hi Sam,

Welcome to the list.

I'm not sure what in particular is wrong with your machine - we'll
probably need a bit more information to sort that out.

What I can tell you is this:

Powering down your machine.
---------------------------

It is of course better to shut down the machine in the correct manner,
but here's what will happen if you don't:

- You may loose a tiny amount of data (Disk drives don't always write
data when you ask them to, often it is cached inside the machine for a
few fractions of a second before it can be 'synched').

- When you reboot the machine will realise that it's filesystem hasn't
been unmounted cleanly and will do some repairs on it - on recent
versions of Linux this should be relatively quick because they tend to
use the ext3 filesystem (which is journalled).  Older systems use ext2
which (like Window's FAT32 or NTFS) is unjournalled and will take a long
time to repair.

- When you log into KDE it may have saved your session from before the
crash.  Saving a session means that the state of the applications you
were running is recorded, so that you log in again all the applications
you had open were still there.

What to do if the window manager stops responding.
--------------------------------------------------

In Linux we have a number of "terminals" available for use, this is
routed in the fact that Unix and Linux are true "multi-user" operating
systems, that is we can have several people working on the same machine
at the same time.  It is possible to swap terminals on the local machine
using the following key combos:

Ctrl-Alt-F1   Terminal 1
Ctrl-Alt-F2   Terminal 2
   .
   .
   .
Ctrl-Alt-F6   Terminal 6
...and so on...

Your Window Manager usually runs on the 7th terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F7).

Because of the way Linux is structured, if your window manager locks up
it only very rarely means that the machine itself has crashed.  You can
kill the offending Window Manager session by using the key combo:

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

... if you are using a graphical login manager like KDM of GDM (by
default mandrake will) your screen should flicker a bit and take you
back to the login screen.  If you aren't running one of these then
you'll find yourself on a command line.

 
-- 
Geoff Teale
general: <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
home   : <geoff at tealeg.uklinux.net>
work   : <gteale at cmedltd.com>
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