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I know why the computer's frozen

SWMBO visited a Telstra site with a semi-broken chunk of Flash on its front page, which jams up any broswer with a Flash plugin, & in fact makes the whole screen unresponsive. Most unusual for Linux. SWMBO had just been for a morning walk.

Miss 5 had a “bird television”-style explanation:

You haven’t been sitting at it, & now it’s cross.

Oh, if only computer problems were that simple. (-:

Anyway, a few seconds with top(1) & the k (kill) command, & it seems to be right again.

Comments

Tim Connors said…
There are two reasons I will keep my laptop powered up once I transfer everything over to an old sun workstation I have.

1) multimedia. The card is capable of accelaration, but the FB driver is dead in the 2.6 kernel.
2) to be able to ssh into the workstation when something buggers up.

So often I've rescued myself with 2.
Leon RJ Brooks said…
timc: so often I’ve rescued customers across town with 2. (-:

Well... not that often — maybe a couple of times a month — but it makes a big difference to them to be able to yell over a ’phone at someone and have a problem mysteriously fix itself.

Calls from Windows users are sad. I can’t help you because the machine doesn’t have remote access software — & even if it did, it’s been totally trashed by a virus, so not only can I not revive it, but you’ll probably find if you do revive it that your files are no more.

I did have one happy experience like this, though, in that they had a Windows 2000 server & a SaMBa server on the LAN; whatever trick the virus was using to blast files with didn’t work through SaMBa, so the files on that server were untouched. Unlike, of course, the smoking ruins dribbling off the Win2k server.

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