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Spinning Cursor a feature, not a bug.
Authored by: Anonymous on Nov 23, '01 03:40:42PM

The following is unconfirmed.

I believe that whenever a window server of any sort shuts down, Mac OS X is smart enough not to drop you at the console. Why is this smart? Watch the system when it shuts down. After all the programs quit, and a few seconds of spinning beach ball, you get a blue screen beachball up in the upper-left corner... *exactly* like leaving XWindows. This is so that lusers don't get scared when the screen goes to white-on-black text.

What evidence do I have of this? Back in 10.0, if you booted in Verbose mode (holding down command-V), this *didn't* happen, and instead of blue screen, you saw the console, with the text "continuing ... done Processor halted." as the system shut down. (During a restart, instead of Processor halted, the text was MACH Reboot). Now I never managed to try XWindows console after a verbose boot, to *prove* this, but I'm sure that it will drop you normally back to the console, and I'll leave the proving of this as an exercise for the reader.



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You're Right!
Authored by: cmccarthy on Nov 24, '01 11:28:05PM

Just tried rebooting in verbose mode, then running and exiting XDarwin from console mode. Sure enough: no beachball-on-blue-screen, just dropped me back to the good old Darwin prompt. Thanks for pointing out an interesting behavior; since I'm usually not booted in verbose mode, though, and I like dropping back to loginwindow instantaneously, I'll stick to exec'ing startx from the console.



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