On 16 Jul 2001, at 15:40, Nico Callewaert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This moning, I was calling FB on SuSe too fast "Great". When
> I started to test it very well, after 15 minutes, the Linux
> machine hangs, I cannot even move the mouse pointer anymore.
> The only thing I can do is switch it off. I don't know what
> could be the problem FB or Linux ? Has anyone experienced
> this before ? One thing is sure, like this I cannot use it
> in a production environment. Should I change the Linux to
> Win2k, or could this be fixed. Any advice is highly
> appreciated.
>

Probably neither, FB runs in application space, so it can't hang the
machine, it doesn't have the rights to do so. Now if your running a
GUI, either KDE or Gnome, then it can seem to crash, bit it's the
GUI that crashed, and it seems to take Linux with it. However it
doesn't.So, you need to make sure you can get to console mode, there
are two ways to do this, one for when you have only this machine
available, and one for when you have at least one other machine
available (although the first one should work on both).

Okay method number 1, you need to make sure that you have getty
available, getty is the program that asks for your username and
password, to authenticate you, under console mode. Usually there are
several available, this way you can press SHIFT-ALT-F2 and you get a
brand new console, to login under, if you can login here, then the
GUI crashed, so you simply need to use the ps command to find out
where the GUI is running, and kill it. Okay now skip down to the
section labeled killing the GUI

The second method, go to another machine, and try to telnet into the
seemingly crashed one. If you can telnet in, you have to login as
yourself, rather then root.

Killing the GUI

Use the command

ps -A | less

that A must be capitalized, it will show you all the processes, one
page at a time, less is the GNU version of the dos command more.
The number in the first column is the process-id, make a note of it.

If your not logged in as root, use the su command to become root, now
use the kill command to dump the GUI, if the process id was 57 you
would use kill 57

Now, you can use ALT-F1 to switch to the main console, which should
either show a command prompt, or be waiting for a login, login as
yourself and type runlevel 5, that will restart the GUI. Login again,
and your back where you started.

Go to the Suse website and see if there have been any updates to the
GUI packages, both KDE and Gnome are works in progress,


Paul







Paul Schmidt,
Tricat Technologies
Email: paul@...
Website: www.tricattechnologies.com