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From: Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: getting the most out of TWM
Date: 17 Jul 2024 04:14:10 -0300
Organization: Bridgewater Institute for Advanced Study - Blacksmith Shop
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

> On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:34:25 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:
> 
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>> 
>>> I kept wondering how a process that ran under the GUI could be the
>>> parent of everything else that ran under that GUI, including obviously
>>> the window manager.
>> 
>> It's not the parent, it "holds" the X session.  In the case of "exec
>> xterm", when xterm exits, the x session ends.
> 
> Except it didn't. In that example, the X server kept running, but there 
> was no window manager or any other X clients to actually let you do 
> anything with it.

I've only excountered something similar to what you describe twice,
both apparently (but not certainly) caused by Netscape Navigator 4.76
(which I was using long ago but more recently than any normal person
:-).

The screen blanked and there was no response to *any* mouse or keyboard
events.  Fixed by telnet over LAN from another computer in the same
room which revealed X still running.  Killing X from the telnet login
returned the affected machine to the original login console.

That was with a system configured to use startx from the command line,
not a GUI X login at boot.  That may make a difference -- I've never
done it that way except on Unix machines which someone else maintained.

Except for those two occasions, terminating the xterm started on the
last line of ~/.xinitrc by:

    exec xterm -geometry 80x30+1+1 "#+1+40" -iconic -name 'X-login'

has always killed X cleanly and returned to the console.

It's my usual practice to launch anything  not launched by .xinitrc
from that xterm.

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada