Tired of freezing laptop

[Bart Silverstrim]

Pat Brown wrote:

> Okay, I guess I'm restarting the X system. I have some keyboard ability, 
> but that's all. If I knew some commands to run a terminal that way since 
> I can't access it through the GUI, I could check processes and see if 
> something was hogging the system, but I don't know the commands.

Someone said it sounded like you're running Kubuntu, and I don't know 
where in the menus to look for that offhand. In Hardy with the GNOME 
interface, click applications, accessories, and Terminal is in there to 
give you shell access.

 From there, type "top" and hit enter.

To exit, hit control-c.

More information: "man top"

There are also some graphical system monitors but I don't know the names 
off the top of my head. In the GNOME Hardy, there's one by clicking 
system->administration->system monitor, but others may need to chime in 
with alternatives for kubuntu or if others from the repos are better in 
their opinion.

>I have 
> the output from dmesg, but it's after restarting X. 

If the system didn't do a full reboot, it should be a running log that 
is appended to.

>I would love to know 
> how to get to a place to kill a process - and know the name of the 
> process. I'm assuming it's Konquerer that's doing the CPU hogging since 
> it's always Konquerer that freezes X.

top lists process ID's. Also from the terminal, you can run "ps" to just 
list processes running. I'll often use "ps -ax" to get full command 
lines of what is running. "man ps" should give information.

To kill a process you issue "kill <process id>". If it won't respond, 
you can do "sudo kill -9 <process id>". the "killall <process name>" 
lets you kill all processes with the name "process name", i.e., "killall 
bash" will probably kill your terminal session since it'll kill all 
shells using bash.

the System Monitor I named in the graphical bit above should also give 
process IDs, and kill items, if I recall correctly.

> When I have full keyboard access I can see Konquerer in the system 
> monitor. It's called konquerer [kdeinit] --si which means nothing to me, 
> I'm afraid. I'm doing my best to learn Linux/Ubuntu but I'm still very 
> green.

We all were at some point :-) The rewards come from continuing to slog 
through the basics until they're somewhat familiar.

If you google for something like "basic linux commands" or "linux new 
user command line" you will probably find a good list of basic commands 
new users should become familiar with...Anyone on the list have a few 
good sites that are up-to-date for Ubuntu users who are new?? If not let 
me know and I'll try googling a guide or two for you to use.

Some basics on your own system, from the terminal, are man for the 
MAN(ual) pages, and apropos to find commands (like "apropos net" to get 
mostly network-related commands).

> The flashplugin-nonfree appears to be installed already.

Okay; next question; are you using Firefox and the same thing happens? I 
don't know if Konqueror users the Mozilla base; FF does, and the plugin 
there I *think* defaults to install under Mozilla browsers.

Please check if your system has FF in it and if so whether YouTube works 
under FireFox. If so, I'll see if I can find info on Konqueror and flash 
for you, but it'll have to be done by proxy or other list members as 
well because I'm not running Kubuntu/Konqueror...

> How do I get to a terminal when my X is frozen? I'll try that next time 
> it freezes.

See if you can find the Kubuntu instructions for getting the terminal up 
and leave it running in the background.

If you have another computer, you can log in and run top constantly from 
that second machine, if you have sshd...I don't know what your 
configuration is at home. Do you have a home network? If so we can try 
teaching you a few neat tricks with a second system logging into the 
Linux one, both because it can be handy and for troubleshooting :-)