Re: Gnome freezes in FC6

[Van <vanyel medusa bioc aecom yu edu>]

I REALLY need some kind of solution to this but I guess no one has more 
of a clue than I do. Since at least Sean Dynan has a similar problem, I 
present this further idea in hope that this may help more than just me 
(or stimulate a better idea in someone else).

Like I said, sometimes if I kill a graphical process during these 
freezes, it "jump starts" the frozen GNOME and I don't have to lose my 
work by rebooting. I'm only beginning to understand how the graphical 
interface (GNOME here) is not the same as the graphical file handler 
interface (i.e. "open folders". That's Nautilus. At least for me in FC6).

So I thought that maybe killing THAT might have the same effect 
(hopefully better, i.e. 100% effective instead of ~60). As a bonus I see 
Nautilus automatically restarts when killed!

SO ... my new suggested workaround is to ssh into the frozen box from 
another machine (If available. This happens in a Fedora VM for me, so 
it's easy. YMMV) and do a

ps -aux | grep nautilus

Then with the PID of nautilus do a

kill -9 <nautilus_pid>

I haven't had another freeze to test with yet (I mean, not since I 
thought of this) so if it works, let me know. Better than restarting 
your whole machine!

- Van

Van wrote:
> Every so often, my Fedora freezes. I've come to realize that it's only 
> the GNOME interface that actually freezes. I'm running Fedora in a 
> Parallels VM. I can ssh into the VM from my outside Mac and even pop 
> X-sessions from it, but I no longer have mouse or keyboard control of 
> Fedora's GNOME Desktop itself. Occasionally if I use ps -aux and choose 
> some graphical process (i.e. like Thunderbird or Firefox or an open 
> terminal window) and kill it, it "jump starts" GNOME and I get control 
> back. But this is "iffy" at best. Usually I just end up doing a "skill 
> -KILL -u van" and then logging back in.
>
> Anyone have a clue as to what could be causing this and how I can fix 
> it? I don't know where to begin to troubleshoot this.
>
> Van