Ok, ok, I know. Mac OS X is rock-solid. If my computer crashes maybe I should try repairing permissions and all that stuff...
But now seriously, Panther does hang sometimes (for me it's about every 2-3 months). A process gets 100% CPU time and you start to get the beach ball. Sometimes you can switch to the finder and force quit, but sometimes is the finder who is taking 100% of the CPU. Then you go to the dock, try to launch a terminal with no luck, or try to use user switching to kill that app from another session (but you end up with a blue screen and the computer trying to load the login screen eternally). Sure, you could wait 3 hours for the process to be killed, or re-spawn or whatever but you don't have that time or sense of humor
The thing is... in all this situations the mouse still moves!!! I'm no UNIX expert but that must mean there is something working down there!!! So maybe it's just aqua that is stuck but the unix core is still doing it's job... and you have to murder your computer pressing 5 sec the power button because you don't have any key combo to kill aqua.
So the same way linux users can kill the X windows IMMEDIATELY using ctrl+alt+backspace (kde and gnome tend to be very crashy) I think we should have a key combination that does the following (with that apple touch):
1. Kill all user programs running. Wait 3 sec for the finder to respond.
2. If not, Kill the finder and the dock. Drop you to the login screen. Wait 3 sec for the login screen to respond.
3. If not, Kill the loginscreen and the windowserver. Drop you to a console and put a message for the newbies "Computer had problems, type reboot to return to mac os x".
4. If not, cross-fingers
This should be entirely possible to do in a UNIX system, so you don't have to cut the power on your machine (you can harm the hardware) and the journal and the filesystem don't get corrupted.
Maybe Apple doesn't think it's necessary since we have "tha supa rocksolid OS", but I think all those with Panther freezes would appreciate it.
What do you guys think?
.-Xavi
PS: English is not my first language, so excuse my mistakes.
Enough lies!
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