Linux frozen...

Okay, today I was listening to some streaming audio when first the audio disappeared, Firefox froze up, and everything went gray....I finally shut things down through the button.

Now with Windows, it was just all about bringing up Task Manager and closing things that way...is there something similar with Linux? What should I do next time a similar problem arises?

Thanks

 

Depends how bad the lockup is.

- Ctrl-Alt-Del will bring up the process table; right click on a process and you can kill it

- If it's enabled as standard (and I can't remember whether I had to do anything to enabe this on my AAO), Ctrl-Alt-Esc will turn the mouse cursor into a kill cursor (skull & crossbones logo) - click on the stuck application and it will kill it.

If those won't work, you may be a bit stuck, but if you can get to a terminal or command line (and using firefox as an example stuck application
- "killall firefox" will attempt to kill all processes with 'firefox' as the application name
- "ps ax | grep firefox" will list the process numbers of anything with 'firefox' anywhere in the process name. Then use "kill <number>" or if that won't work 'kill -9 <number>".
- "top" brings up a list of the processes which are using all your CPU. Press 'k' and enter a process number to kill it; it will ask you for a 'signal' - use signal 15 first and 9 if that fails.

 

That's what I wanted to know...Thanks

 

Engadget+Viddler+FF2+Linpus Light= Frozen system, this is definitely replicate able, try this link and see if it kills your system as well, it may take a few moments for the entire page to load but once it does the HDD activity light pretty much stays on and about the only way out is sometimes you can do a ctrl+alt+del and kill FF that way but most times you have to end up pulling the battery and doing a hard boot, which I know is bad as not too long ago I had to do this and it corrupted my SD card in my expansion slot.

So is this simply something that can be cured by a setting within FF or what ?

 

Yanking the battery isn't something you should do to your poor AAO. If the keyboard reacts at all, then the crash is recoverable, in principle. Usually just a case of killing and restarting X.
If the keyboard doesn't react, you can usually log in from anther machine and either kill the offending X-server or just order a reboot.
If even that doesn't work, shut the system down with the power button (5 sec. press). That will always work, as it's directly encoded into the basics of your machine. There's no way it can be changed or corrupted short of opening the case and taking a soldering iron to the mainboard. After doing this, your next boot may take a few minutes, while the system cleans up any mess left behind by the crash and the forced shutdown.