How do you prevent an application from grinding the whole system to a halt?

[Dana J. Laude]

On Thursday 01 June 2006 22:55, Chanchao wrote:
> This annoyed me this morning... Was happy to see that the
> Dapper download was like 90% finished and still happily
> downloading away.. Then had to rotate an image. (2560 x
> something, 5MP camera shot). While rotating though, The Gimp
> managed to bring everything down. Nothing responded anymore,
> the clock in the top left remained stationary at 9:02 am for
> 20 minutes, I couldn't close Gimp, I couldn't move to a
> different workplace, Ctrl-Alt-F1 and so on didn't do anything
> to give me a TTY, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace didn't do anything..   So
> just had to pull the plug and restart.
>
> Is there anything you can do to stop applications crashing
> everything? Wouldn't the OS take care of such things all by
> itself in a perfect world? (i.e. is something wrong with my
> installation? I do have 512MB memory installed.)

Think about it a second.  You had Gimp open and the dapper 
upgrade upgraded Gimp. ;)  You should just not have anything 
running while doing a major update.

Dana