Today the Debian / Jessie package maintainers pushed through an update to my X-server, bringing that up to version ‘2:1.16.4-1+deb8u1‘. In a case like this, it’s better to restart the session, just to load the new X-server version, but also, to make sure that any problems in running the X-server do not take us by surprise, during some later reboot.
As it happens, the computer this took place on, which I name ‘Phoenix‘, is also my Web-server. And so it’s desirable to perform the restart of the session, without doing a full reboot of the computer. Under Linux, with the ‘KDE’ desktop manager, we can do this by just Logging Out, and then Logging back In. Doing so also causes an X-server restart.
Not doing a full reboot of my computer, also meant that my Apache Web-server continued running, without causing any disruption to the visibility of my Web-site, or of this blog.
Yet, there was a glitch. As I told my user-session to log out, the display hanged, with the mouse-pointer still visible, but with the rest of my display black, and with no further activity on the hard-drive. In this situation I can help myself, by using the KDE, <Ctrl>+<Alt>+Backspace key-combination, to force an X-server restart. Doing so successfully ended my user-session. Then, the X-server restarted, and I got to log back in.
What this means is that the preparatory work I did according to this earlier posting, has paid off.
I count this as a successful update.
Dirk
