If your like me you've been scrolling away in firefox maybe looking for home renovation projects or while playing some music with xmms in the background, then all of a sudden BAM! you mouse is stuck and the OS is frozen well when you force shutdown you might see something like this when dsl trys to reboot
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xauth: error in locking xauthority xauth: error in locking xauthority xauth: error in locking xauthority xauth: error in locking xauthority file /home/dsl/.Xauthority
yeah it sucks. To recover from this lets first remount the HD. Directly after the error message is shown type:
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# mount -n -o remount,rw /
now it should insert a return and send you to a new line in which you will type:
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sudo fsck
this is to repair whatever damages the hd suffered from the force shutdown. Let it do it's thing going all the way up to 100%, however if it says the hd is CLEAN then you want to reboot (the safe non-forced way) by telling the terminal:
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sudo shutdown -r now
in case you curious the -r is for restart and now is telling the terminal you want to resart RIGHT now. I hope someone out there can use this, I know that when I first was in this situation I had no idea what to doThank you.
I wish I read this post a month ago, before I found out what caused my crashes.....
(Using Opera, didn't know the web cache was set so high by default...... good way to kill a computer)HAHA! im very glad it helped you. Yeah for me firefox is very unstable. this post wasnt up a month ago btw. i just made it a few days ago.
original here.