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

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Tom Roche <Tom_Roche@pobox.com> 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.

Yes - the pecking order is:

(boot) -> ... -> tty6 -> X (in tty7) -> GNOME or KDE with
a window manager -> GUI Emacs

The "desktop" is the GNOME/KDE/whatever part. You can
do without it like this:

1. Disable the login manager (google your desktop to
   find out what it is).

2. Now the computer won't start X.

3. So instead you do it with manually with startx(1)
   or xinit(1) (put such a call is the shell's
   "profile" file - e.g., ~/.zprofile for zsh - to
   have it automatized if you want it on every boot).

4. In ~/.xinitrc, start a window manager, e.g.
   openbox(1), in the *background* (with "&" after the
   command) - last, add a call to a terminal emulator
   (e.g., xterm), *not* running in the background.

Done - either start Emacs in xinitrc as well, or do it
from xterm. Now you have the same GUI Emacs but
without the diffuse desktop stuff!

> Occasionally the desktop hangs

Try my method and see if it still does. It "shouldn't"
in either case, but if it does, it does.

> 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?)

Well, the problem isn't "how to shut Emacs down
gracefully when the desktop is hanged" but "why does
the desktop hang and how can I fix it?" That said, the
man page for kill(1) may help you.

> 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?

You can hope to do something with IPC and kill in
particular, but again, get the desktop working or get
it away is the actual solution.

-- 
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