[ubuntu-za] Ubuntu Linux virus?

[Morgan Collett]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 21:45, David Robert Lewis<ethnopunk at telkomsa.net> wrote:
> Not sure what to make of this weird behaviour.
>
> Mouse is acting very strangely, spazzes out, jumps around starts to
> click on things. I even get logged out of my session.
>
> Started doing this a couple of days ago, and then just froze up.
>
> I fixed the freeze by unloading psmouse (sudo modprobe -r psmouse)
>
> and then reloading it.
>
> Then I figured it might be the versioning, and I reloaded by stripping
> out the version info
>
> sudo modprobe -f psmouse
>
> This worked, unfroze but now mouse is back to its old tricks.
>
> It feels like a hack attack, or some kind of virus?
>
> Alternatively could be something to do with java and xulrunner, because
> it happens only when I have a browser open?

I like to see what's happening under the hood of my systems, so I
always add the System Monitor applet to the top GNOME panel. I set it
to show me CPU, memory, network and system load.

The CPU display especially helps to show when something kicks in with
a high impact to the system - like a flash video in the browser, or
some times Firefox just runs away with the CPU and I have to kill it
to get my system back.

If you're running on a system with limited memory, that's a likely
cause of system slowdown when the RAM gets full and it starts swapping
memory of active programs to the swap partition only to need it again
and swap something else out - "thrashing". Eventually the whole system
may freeze for 5 minutes until the OOM killer (out of memory) detects
there is a problem and kills something to free up the memory.

The System Monitor helps with that too and you can show how much of
your swap is in use.

It's *unlikely* to be a virus, because in the words of RMS,
"GNU/Linux" "wasn't designed to execute programs that arrive in the
mail" (or words to that effect). Hence the jokes about "virus
execution failed - please run as root".

Regards
Morgan