Re: Well, That Was Special

["Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart bmsi com>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Donald Henson wrote:

> respond to anything. I was able to log off. When I logged back in,
> Evolution was not running so I clicked on its icon. Something happened
> but Evolution did not start up. I logged off/on again. Same result. Then
> I used (gasp!) a Windows technique. I rebooted the system. This worked.
> Evolution came back up like there had never been a problem. Why I am
> posting this? Because...

This is a common problem.  Evolution, like Mozilla, probably has a 
mechanism to prevent multiple copies from running.  The bug you ran
into put Evolution into a hard loop with signals ignored.  Mozilla
does this too when I tickle certain bugs.  When you log out, the 
session manager signals Evolution, but it is ignored.  When you try
to run evolution again, the new copy it sees that it already running
and shuts down.

Instead of rebooting, run 'top' or gnome system monitor or 'ps' or other 
process lister and kill your spastic evolution (or mozilla) process
with SIGKILL (signal 9).  

You might try signal 3 first to see if you can get a traceback for bug
reporting.

Why is it so easy for big programs like mozilla and evolution to get
into hard loops with signals disabled?

-- 
			Stuart D. Gathman <stuart bmsi com>
      Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
	"[Microsoft] products are even less buggy than others, in terms of
	    per capita usage." - Steve Balmer, Microsoft Corporation