On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Rob Mahurin wrote: > I'm a little curious as to under exactly what circumstances a reboot > is actually necessary. I know a reboot is necessary to load a new
Internal hardware and kernel changes. > difficulty. I've heard that if you shut down gpm and X and any other > rodent-listening programs you can also change the mouse without any > problems. I'm guessing there's a way to do this with the keyboard or > the monitor, if maybe you could remotely shut down the console or You can do this with anything that plugs into the back, except SCSI, I think (and that would probably work too if you unloaded the driver for your SCSI card first). I have my mouse, monitor, and keyboard on a switch box so they can control two computers. As a result they're only plugged in to one computer at a time. Works fine. You don't need to reboot or in fact do anything special at all to change ethernet and/or telephone cables. Multimedia cables likewise. I don't know about USB, but it probably works too. Most stuff is pretty flexible about this sort of thing. > something. I think you can do an "init 1" to get into single-user and > do single-user things without losing uptime, even repartition a disk Right. Repartitioning a disk is tricky. It's not really safe to repartition your boot disk without rebooting. Others are fine. The boot disk is fine most of the time too, given that you don't change your root partition.
