Re: how to tell graphical Emacs to shutdown cleanly from tty1?

[jorge.alfaro-murillo@yale.edu (Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo)]

Tom Roche writes:

> Lately I run GNU Emacs mostly as GUI on X/tty7 (which I'll call 
> "the desktop" as opposed to emacs-desktop) on one of my Debian 
> laptops. Occasionally the desktop hangs, in which case I usually 
> can goto tty1 and `sudo shutdown -whatever now`. Unfortunately 
> this does not seem to cause Emacs to shut down as cleanly as I'd 
> like: I'd like Emacs to (e.g.) save any unsaved buffers and save 
> its emacs-desktop, but that doesn't seem to get done. (Am I 
> missing something?) 
> 
> So I'm thinking that, in this usecase, I should utter something 
> from tty1 (before `shutdown`) to tell Emacs to shutdown cleanly 
> ... but I don't know what to say. How to do this?

Start a server every time that you start your computer, from a 
terminal you can do:

#+BEGIN_SRC shell
  emacsclient -c -a '' 
#+END_SRC

every time that you want to open emacs. That will start a server 
if there is none or connect if there is one already. You will be 
able to connect to that server even from TTY1, and M-x 
save-buffers-kill-emacs if you want a clean exit.

But I guess the relevant question is, why is your X hanging?

-- 
Jorge.