[Xen-users] Re: How to recover from crashed domU?

[Molle Bestefich <molle.bestefich@xxxxxxxxx>]

René Pfeiffer wrote:
> I need Alt-Gr as well. In my personal opinion
> Ctrl-] is not more complicated than Ctrl-Alt-Del.

It's not complicated in terms of finding it on the keyboard.

It's not exceedingly complicated to guess that you have to
press Ctrl-AltGr-] (not Ctrl-]) because he who wrote the
documentation is blind to i18n factors.

Sometimes this just works, especially if you're sitting right
in front of the machine.  But...

It gets complicated when you have a KVM switch or VNC client
(or Java VM running your VNC client or KVM software) or what
not in the middle, and that piece of software conveys the
characters pressed "in a wrong way".

You might say that "they" should fix it, but it's never
exactly clear where the error occurs.  It could be in any
piece of software on the way, and it could even be that the
user guessed the magic international keyboard combo wrong -
which is why I'm arguing that most people will just shut
up about it and never use the shortcut.  They'll bail to
using ctrl-alt-del like the OP or xterm or what not.

It might even be that none of the intermediate software is
buggy per se, but that it just has never been uniformally
decided where exactly fx. scancode <-> virtual key
translations are performed.  The result being that various
systems has to do intermediate translations from one to the
other which obviously does not produce perfect results.

I regret to say that I've never actually found why this
happens.  All I can provide is empirical evidence - I've
used a lot of remote console (text, graphics) systems,
and I can remember only one of them that seemed to flawlessly
convey *almost* all keyboard characters.  Especially
international characters and characters which have different
modifiers than they do on US keyboards are a cause of trouble.



> Besides you can always remap the keys
> yourself:
>
> http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/misc/Remap.htm
> http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2001-Apr/2702.html

I'd much rather fix things by simplifying them, I don't think
adding more complexity is a good solution.

A good solution would be to use ASCII characters with _no_
modifiers, for example (as some remote console systems use)
ESC + A.  That is, ESC first, then upper-case A.


J D Freeman wrote:
> And even if you make it configurable can
> you imagine the support questions?

There's a third option; simply have two shortcuts.  One
that's compatible with Telnet so the old-timers don't have
a cow and one that works across KVM's, VM's, RS232 etc.


René Pfeiffer wrote:
> > (And it would be a top priority too, since nobody would use their crap
> > if it wasn't _mostly_ such a breeze to do so.)
>
> Several hundred years ago the plague was very widespread. Nevertheless
> it wasn't popular at all. ;)

Au contraire, it was very popular, everybody had it ;-).

And hardly a fair comparison, since people actually pay to use Windows.


> "From the delicate strands,
>  between minds we weave our mesh:
>  a blanket to warm the soul."
>  --- Lady Deirdre Skye (SMAC) ---

Alpha Centauri? :-)

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