xcons murders the X server

[Blair P. Houghton]

In article <945 at aoa.UUCP> mbr at aoa (Mark Rosenthal) writes:
>In article <4327 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>>	[ Description of X-server going south when using xcons ]
>
>I seemed to be able to force the problem by filling up one of the disk
>partitions.[...]  I speculate that perhaps it has something to do with
>the format of the error generated when a disk partition fills up, but
>who knows.
>
>In any case, I never found a solution to the problem.  DEC's support line was
>no help at all.  They took three days to come up with the answer that they
>considered "xcons" and "xterm" to be unsupported products, and that I should
>run DECwindows instead.

"Your Guccis need a lace, but we don't know how to tie it, so here's some
enormous rubber boots instead...buckle away."

>Sadly, my solution is what you call "no solution".  Comment out the xcons line
>in /etc/ttys, and make sure your window manager has a refresh screen selection.

Both done long ago.  "Refresh" is at the top of the pop-up menu.

Several people have mentioned using

	cat -u /dev/xcons

which actually does the job for a while, but then causes the same
server symptoms as running xcons(8X).  I think you're right about the
"format of the error generated" being the problem.  I don't get it just
by filling up disks, though.

The "cat -u..." command has another problem:  if the server dies, you
can never kill that cat, even as root and logged in on a separate
character terminal.  It ignores kill -9.  The only cure is reboot.

Actually, I could live with the non-xcons screen-scribbling messages,
but there's documentation to the effect that (and please don't ask me
where, I think it was buried in the section on ed(1) :-)  these
messages will only become visible if you kill the server, which is
true:  when Xqdsg terminates, the invisible ink suddenly becomes readable,
but only for the half-second it takes init to start up another Xqdsg...
the only cure here must be to halt init(oyveh).

				--Blair
				  "Hey, this one's got a busted
				   buckle on it..."