Development Begins On Ubuntu 11.04

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Development Begins On Ubuntu 11.04

Not even a week has passed since the release of Ubuntu 10.10, but developers are now free to start committing package changes for the next release, Ubuntu 11.04, which is codenamed Natty Narwhal. Matthias Klose has announced that the Ubuntu Natty repository is now open for business...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODY4Mg

[another_sam]

What are the chances that an X crash on Ubuntu 11.04 does not cause rest of the programs to die?

If none or few, could Ubuntu 11.10 be better in that regard?

[Veerappan]

What are the chances that an X crash on Ubuntu 11.04 does not cause rest of the programs to die?

If none or few, could Ubuntu 11.10 be better in that regard?

I think it depends on your definition of "rest of the programs". X not running as root will make the system more secure and will hopefully also make the system more stable overall (at least as far as hard locks are concerned). If X dies, I'm guessing all of your graphical programs will still get taken down with it. It just means you'll have a better chance of killing/restarting X and continuing on without needing a reboot, and that programs that find vulnerabilities in X won't be able to immediately get root access because of it.

[bridgman]

My recollection was that application programs could be written to survive an X server failure and reconnect after the server restarted, but that most programs are not written that way today. Take this with a grain of salt, it's just something I think I remember reading.

[Ex-Cyber]

ISTR that someone created an X proxy server that allows apps to stay alive without a "real" server underneath, but I don't remember what it's called and can't come up with strong enough Google-fu at the moment to dig it up.

[Yfrwlf]

ISTR that someone created an X proxy server that allows apps to stay alive without a "real" server underneath, but I don't remember what it's called and can't come up with strong enough Google-fu at the moment to dig it up.

My recollection was that application programs could be written to survive an X server failure and reconnect after the server restarted, but that most programs are not written that way today. Take this with a grain of salt, it's just something I think I remember reading.

That would be such awesomeness, a really helpful feature to have overall. It's changes like that which are really meaningful in adding quality to GNU/Linux as a whole.

The next thing would be to have Xorg auto-restart upon a crash, but that's simple and I'm sure that will be implemented at the same time rootless Xorg is implemented.

The next big thing that Linux needs: Windows has its ctrl-alt-del screen which takes over the window manager and overlays controls on top of everything else. This gives the user power in case of an app locking up. You either need the System Monitor app or something like it to come up upon ctrl-alt-del keypress no matter what, which means all Xorg programs need to be prevented from taking over that keystroke, or Xorg simply will always listen to that keystroke even if a program also wishes to act on it too.

However it can be done, it needs to be done, because users should never ever be forced to learn ctrl-alt-F*, logging in, and spontaneously somehow learning the command-line-fu needed to kill an app which is taking up the whole Xorg display and refusing to close.

[Yfrwlf]

I think it depends on your definition of "rest of the programs". X not running as root will make the system more secure and will hopefully also make the system more stable overall (at least as far as hard locks are concerned). If X dies, I'm guessing all of your graphical programs will still get taken down with it. It just means you'll have a better chance of killing/restarting X and continuing on without needing a reboot, and that programs that find vulnerabilities in X won't be able to immediately get root access because of it.

It will be great, yes, though of course all systems should be configured to bring Xorg back up via whatever process checker or whatnot after an Xorg crash since normal desktop users should not have to learn those command-line commands to become productive again.

[google7027]

ISTR that someone created an X proxy server that allows apps to stay alive without a "real" server underneath, but I don't remember what it's called and can't come up with strong enough Google-fu at the moment to dig it up.



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[Veerappan]

Awesome. I'd love for something like either this proxy or another mechanism to allow X programs to survive an X crash, I just hadn't thought about how it would/could/should be done, other than that relentless state saving would not be it.