An interesting article has been making its way around the internet the past few days, titled "Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS". Mac OS X indeed does some things very, very right, just like many other operating systems and graphical environments do some things very, very right. The issue with the list of the article in question is that many of the items on the list are not exactly examples of "Usability Highs" at all.
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Member since:2005-11-14
I've been running Linux for years (guess about 4 years as my primary desktop), and I've never had a kernel panic. If you're using some sort of custom kernel, you can't generalize Linux and say that Linux is very bad about such things. Seems to be more of a problem with your setup than what the overwhelming majority of people do.
Member since:2006-09-27
I don't think he was making a point that Linux is bad about crashing, so much as the way you're notified isn't as elegant as it maybe could be.
OSX's panic screen is clear and concise, and you know that the system has crashed. I have seen one kernel panic on Linux in the 3 years I've been using it, and I had the same experience. Screen looks frozen, and on my keyboard numlock and scroll lock were blinking. I had a pretty good idea that the kernel had panic'd when I couldn't alt+sysrq REISUB my way out of it, but it is definitely not an intuitive way of alerting the user the system has crashed. The Windows BSOD and OS/2 TRAP screens aren't beautiful, but they leave no doubt what happened.
I'm pretty sure that's the point he was making.
edit: typos
Edited 2008-08-14 04:20 UTC
Member since:2006-11-13
Just to make sure everybody knows.... kernel panics are expected in bleeding edge software. No matter the OS.
Do you know if Linux has something similar to what I used in OS/2. Back in the days when I used OS/2, I had a watchdog daemon running and it was link to any external switch - I simply used my joystick. If a system crash occured that froze the keyboard and mouse, I could click the joystick button and the watchdog daemon kills the hanging program returning control back to me. This was awesome. At the moment (under Linux), I go to my co-workers PC, SSH into mine and kill the process myself. I would love the watchdog/joystick feature under Linux though!
Member since:2007-03-26
If it's just an X application that's locking then [alt]+[F7] into the CLI then proceed to do the same as what you're co-workers would have done except from your own desktop.
You can then [alt]+[F1] to get back into your X session.
You may need to check I got the F key's correct though.(I wasn't 100% certain on them)
Member since:2005-07-20
Member since:2005-12-18
Hey... just use the BSOD of xscreensaver... there you have a number of hang ups of different systems.... including BSODs for different versions of güindous (of course). I think it's the safe's way to see a kernel panic.... other than use -mm (or any other non-stable kernel) like slynx does. :-)
Member since:
2005-07-20
Linux is awful about kernel panics while running graphics. Since I run bleeding edge -mm series kernels on my laptop I have seen many of them.
What happens is that the graphical desktop just stops. No mouse movement, no screen updates. The Caps Lock key starts to blink and that is about it. There is no way to switch back to a text console to view the kernel panic.
If you have configured a serial or network console then you get the panic message as output, but that is the only way.
I haven't used it myself but I've read that kdump can get around this. kdump works by kexec'ing a special kernel which is then used to copy the kernel panic and a memory image to disk. This kdump kernel can also reinit the graphics hardware, sometimes.
Edited 2008-08-14 01:21 UTC