Jaunty Puppy

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is due out on the 23rd of April, so I thought it is time I took a look at it. It wasn't too painful upgrading Woof and I now have a working Jaunty-pup.

There's one serious problem though, CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE is disabled. I ran into this when testing the video mode in the Xorg Wizard, and was unable to get out of the test screen. We use CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE as the "OK" button sometimes causes the PC to hang -- which it did on my laptop. I was able to choose the video mode and it worked without testing. On the Puppy desktop, CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE is still disabled.

Oh dear. I had read recently that Fedora had done this, and I made a mental note to stay away from Fedora. But it is more widespread... I hope that it was not a decision made by the Xorg developers. Anyway, what to do? We need that key combination.

UPDATE
Ok, I found out. Yes, it's the Xorg developers. Fortunately it can turned on in xorg.conf:

http://rivviepop.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/fedora-11-beta-ctrl-alt-backspace-disabled-by-default/

This is what I have to put into xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection

---

Comments

Re: CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE
Username: BarryK
There is still a problem though. I can put that fix into /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which is fine when the desktop is running, but the first time I hit this problem was in the Wizard doing a test screen, and I don't recall what config file that uses. Anyway, Jaunty is looking good, and I'll post a progress report, and some thoughts/suggestions about Puppy5, probably tomorrow. Approaching time for an alpha4 also.

CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE
Username: Sage
"As I've said on several occasions, CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE does NOT work in Puppy for old (but not that old) SiS chipsets - causes an immediate, hard shutdown, including the PSU, which cannot be achieved by the usual means unless acpi=force is present. On the other hand, all other distros, including F1 ...F10 do behave correctly on SiS chipsets with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, so it would appear that is rather more to this tale?

CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE
Username: Sage
"735 - the most popular and widest distributed ever, 748 - just about the best I've ever encountered and also extremely popular. 761/965 combo (for 64 bit) - no issues with Puppy.

Testing X in the Wizard
Username: BarryK
"Ah yes, I've just looked at the 'xorgwizard' script and refreshed my memory. Xorg is first run like this: Xorg -configure which probes the system and exits, writing an auto-generated file to /root/xorg.conf.new. The Wizard reads this and composes the rest of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, then the script runs 'Xorg' without any parameters, which will be using /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Meaning, putting the fix into the beginning of that file will work for the test screen. ...this is something that Dougal will be familiar with, as he wrote big chunks of the code in the Xorg Wizard.

jaunty-pup test drive
Username: smil99
"Barry wrote "It wasn't too painful upgrading Woof and I now have a working Jaunty-pup." Is it possible to have a test drive of jaunty-pup? Thanks. smil99

Jaunty test
Username: BarryK
"smil99, Yes indeed, coming real soon. greenpossum, I didn't know that you had to do it in rapid succession. I do know that we had some cases where it had to be done twice, but I don't recall it having to be done rapidly. Anyway, see my next post, problem solved.

Tags: woof