Re: [TCLUG:1289] Network Party

[Josh Becker <joshb@techie.com>]

Sometime around the 21th of September in 1998, a certain Andrew McCulloh said:

> Most video games (unlike normal programs) under linux circumvent the
> kernel in some way to get at the actual video and memory devices. This 
> makes the game faster. Unfortunately it can hose your entire
> system. If you are lucky you can login from another place and kill the 
> offending process, but usually you have to restart. The only time I've 
> had linux crash from a software problem is while playing doom...

I just wrote a little daemon that monitors the joystick port, so if the
keyboard locks up (which I haven't had happen yet) I can hit a sequence of
buttons on the joystick (a sequence, so I don't accidentally reboot the
machine) and execute a shutdown on a 5-minute timer. I put it on 5 minutes
in case I -do- end up activating it accidentally, so I have time to login
and cancel it from here, or from a remote term (my PalmPilot) just in
case.

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| Josh Becker                   - aka -                     JellyD |
| email: joshb@techie.com                       IRC: EFnet, DALnet |
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