restarting gdm on an embedded system

Hello,

I built an embedded system and am running ubuntu 9.04 on it. The system does not have a keyboard mouse or anything attached to it, but a small touch sensitive display.

X-windows (the touch screen driver) sometimes freezes and I need to restart X-windows.

The embedded system has a front panel with some buttons and I want to be able to restart X-windows using a key combination. The key panel is read/controlled with a daemon.

What I want is to restart X with a key combination, but how do I make the call? Something like:

system("service gdm restart > /dev/null"); doesn't seem to work. (probably because there's no shell?)

any ideas?

thanks,

Ron

you would need to have root access to issue commands to restart services, which is more likely the reason why it didn't work

Quote:

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Originally Posted by coopstah13

you would need to have root access to issue commands to restart services, which is more likely the reason why it didn't work

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correct, the deamon runs as root.

Actually on Fedora 12 it just works, the problem I have is on a system running Ubuntu 9.04. (same/similar hardware).
Also, on both machines, when not running it as a deamon it just works.
(i checked the process on ubuntu, it runs as root there too)

I am using this:

if (execl("/etc/init.d/gdm", "/etc/init.d/gdm", "restart") == -1)
_exit(-1); // bummer, execl returned so it failed

in a fork since execl overwrites the process and /etc/init.d/gdm terminates if execl was successful