FergyTech

I borrowed my brother’s Xbox to entertain both me and Alex (3-year-old son) last night.  I let him play “Cars” and I patiently waited for him to go to bed so I can play “Forza” - by falling alseep on the floor - genius!  After vigorously playing my campaign mode, acquiring three new cars, levelling to 10, and decaling the mess out of two cars I realized that I should not be going to bed some time after 3:30am.  I have too many things to do, in the morning, and video games is NOT one of them.  I must have played a straight 4-5 hour session and didn’t realize it.  Sure my fingers hurt, but it wasn’t an indication that I’ve been playing too long… just that I needed to not put so much pressure on the buttons.

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A GUI is a very complex piece of software and there could be any number of reasons why it would lock up on you. If you need to kill your x server and then restart it, here are some tips:

Killing X server via Command

Type “init 3″ in your terminal and that should kill x server.  If it doesn’t find the command, then switch to the root user by typing “su -” (you will need to know the root password).

Restarting X server

Simply use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. Some times this will help, but this combination will explicitly restart the X server.

Working with a Console

If the previous keyboard combination did not work then try CTRL+ALT+F1. This will not kill X server, it will simply open a full screen console. I believe Red Hat and Fedora Core have F1-F6 as options. If you want to switch back to a GUI environment use the keyboard combination CTRL+ALT+F7.

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