Re: command line reset?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 02:46:15PM -0800 or thereabouts, mjbjr beaudesign com wrote:
> I've been pressing the envelope, seemingly, of late, and have had several
> gnome/pager lockups.  The mouse moves, but apps don't see clicks and the
> pager doesn't respond.  I can get to a console, and rather than killing
> everything, I'd rather give gnome a 'restart'.  If it's possible, how
> would I do that?

You would run 'top' and look for what is eating the CPU and so on. 
(Be careful assessing what's using the memory: you have to subtract
the amount listed in 'share' to get an accurate assessment.)

Then hit 'k' and type in the process number for it. k is kill Do not
believe anyone who tells you it stands for 'keep running' and is thus
harmless :) If you run top as root, you can kill practically anything.

There are some programs you don't want to do this to. I have never 
dared try it in Linux, but it used to be possible on some old UNIXes 
to kill off 'init', for example. 'init' is the ultimate parent process: 
when that dies, everything does. I would assume you can't do this, but 
I wouldn't bet my filesystem on it :) And you might be running something
not-Linux, and I have no clue what other UNIXen do there. 

If you think something in Gnome has locked up, but you don't want to
start by killing off X, then you would kill off the X clients. That's
any program you're running in X (they are X clients because they talk 
to the X server). Some of them, notably file managers and the panel, 
will respawn themselves if you kill them off.

Shoot them one by one and wait and see whether X, and thus Gnome
wakes up. Obviously, you don't want to shoot X or gnome-session itself,
unless you've run out of other things to kill :) panel, gnome-terminal, 
xmms, netscape (_particularly_ netscape :)), gmc, big word processors
and anything saying "_applet" are all candidates for this pruning.

Anything ending in 'd' is likely to be a daemon. Don't go randomly
killing daemons off if you're not sure what they are. There are some
which are not supposed to be killable, but do you want to be the
one to discover they are? A similar example is the font server, xfs.
I wouldn't kill that unless I was really desperate and about to hit
control-alt-delete anyway, either. 

To get out of 'top', hit 'q' for 'quit' (and it's 'h' for help). There
is a much nicer graphical version, gtop, but if X has locked up, it's
not going to help :) 

Telsa