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

[Adriano Varoli Piazza]

2006/6/2, James Gray <james at grayonline.id.au>:
> On Fri, 2 Jun 2006 02:55 pm, 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.
>
> Hmmm.  So you were doing a full system upgrade with X running and doing
> graphics editing work at the same time....then wonder why the hell it all
> fell in a heap?  :P

Downloading stuff isn't yet "a full system upgrade". And I wouldn't
blame anyone for doing a full system upgrade with X running: it's the
supposed modus operandi on Ubuntu. If everyone had to do the things
you mention to update their systems, Ubuntu's famed "ease of use"
would be dead and buried. I do wonder why that system ground to a
halt.

-- 
Adriano Varoli Piazza
The Inside Out: http://moranar.com.ar
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