firestarter start failure?

[Robert Holtzman]

On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, Ed Greshko wrote:

> man ps
>
> The relevant section is...
>
> PROCESS STATE CODES
> Here are the different values that the s, stat and state output specifiers
> (header "STAT" or "S") will display to describe the state of a process.
> D    Uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
> R    Running or runnable (on run queue)
> S    Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)
> T    Stopped, either by a job control signal or because it is being traced.
> W    paging (not valid since the 2.6.xx kernel)
> X    dead (should never be seen)
> Z    Defunct ("zombie") process, terminated but not reaped by its parent.
>
> For BSD formats and when the stat keyword is used, additional characters may
> be displayed:
> <    high-priority (not nice to other users)
> N    low-priority (nice to other users)
> L    has pages locked into memory (for real-time and custom IO)
> s    is a session leader
> l    is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL pthreads do)
> +    is in the foreground process group

As I said in my post I already checked "man ps" and had problems 
interpreting the explanation of the STATE codes, i.e. not sure what 
Interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete)  means, that it's 
in sleep mode waiting for an event to complete?

No idea what session leader means.

I don't think that "is multi-threaded (using CLONE_THREAD, like NPTL 
pthreads do)" bears on my problem.

Also, firestarter only appears in the "ps" output is when it's GUI is 
open. This despite the fact that according to the boot messages it should 
start at boot.

As the years go by I find I know less and less about this stuff.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
"The person who says it cannot be done should not
  interrupt the person doing it."
      -blatantly plagiarized -