Getting stuck while alt-tabbing

[Daniel Klein]

> That would indeed be quite unpleasant. I see you tried switching virtual 
> terminals and killing X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and it sounds like the lock 
> keys are also unresponsive. Considering that, you may not have any luck with 
> Ctrl-Alt-Del either.

I quote my mail: ctrl-alt+f1-f6 are ignored, ctrl-alt+backspace is
ignored. Everything I do keyboardwise is completely ignored, including
switching terminals or killing X.

> Have you any way of logging into the computer remotely, such as SSH, assuming 
> it would still respond to that? That is a much nicer way to kill a computer 
> that has locked up, and in many cases, you need only kill the deviating 
> processes. This might also allow further investigation of the problem.

That would be wonderful if I had that opportunity, but unfortunately I
don't. Only one computer here.

> Other than that, read 
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO-8.html#ss8.6 if you are 
> not familiar with magic SysRq. It's important to know why it's good, why it's 
> bad, and how you can use it to break toys. Then try the following, waiting a 
> bit between each to let them take effect:
> 
> Alt-SysRq-K to kill all process on the active virtual terminal.
> Alt-SysRq-E to send the TERM signal to all processes but init
> Alt-SysRq-I to send the KILL signal to all processes but init
> Alt-SysRq-L to send the KILL signal to all processes, including init
> Alt-SysRq-S to run an emergency sync on all mounted filesystems to prevent 
> data loss
> Alt-SysRq-U to remount them as read-only to prevent data loss and stave off 
> fsck on reboot
> Alt-SysRq-R to turn off keyboard raw mode. This may let you use Ctrl-Alt-Del 
> if it wasn't working before.
> Alt-SysRq-B to force reboot
> Alt-SysRq-O to force shutdown
> 
> These bypass regular keyboard handling, so there is a chance they might work, 
> if they are enabled.

I'll have a look at that, but I don't have high hopes, seeing that even
numlock toggling doesn't come through.

>>I'm using Linux for stability.. this is pissing me off mightily.
> 
> 
> That's understandable, but remember that we're all very lucky to be using 
> something that is given to us.

Absolutely, I'm not complaining.

> Again, I don't think it's a KDE problem -- it sounds much too severe for that. 
> Without pointing too many fingers, the underlying X is more likely the 
> culprit, and that may well give varying symptoms for the same problem under 
> different desktop environments and window managers. I would still try 
> downgrading Xlibs.

Alright, I'm gonna give that a shot soon. Thanks a lot for the help. Do
you think I should repost this bug description on debian-user then?

Daniel


PS: This is completely unrelated: What would be the easiest way to 
enable me to just reply to mailinglist messages with my email client's 
reply function? Right now that defaults to mailing back to ONLY the user 
who sent mail, and that's not very helpful. Is there some simple way of 
changing that, in thunderbird? I see that the messages is forwarded with 
the original "From:" intact and the mailinglist is only mentioned in the 
to: section, with no specific reply-to in the mail. I've started putting 
in a reply-to to kde at mail.kde.org now, but that is a bothersome thing to 
do for every single mail as well.. there's got to be a simple way to 
have this done automatically.
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