[GRLUG] Ubuntu 7.10

[Raymond McLaughlin]

Bob Kline wrote:
> I've seen problems with Firefox
> under 7.04 if I leave it up long
> enough.  Seems to depend on what
> I'm doing with Firefox.  Number of
> windows, and maybe what's in them.
> 
> Sometimes it will go a long time
> without problems,  and other times
> I'll get a hard wedge.  The screen
> locks up.  I reboot, because I don't
> have a separate terminal hooked up,
> but it does come to that.

Do you know about using <Ctl>+<Alt>+<F1>
to switch to a real, text mode, console? And failing that
<Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Backspace> will kill/restart your grapic display, still
better than rebooting the whole machine.
No offense if you do, some people don't. In many instances a program can
lock up the graphical display, but you can still get to a text console
to kill the rogue process(es). Still there are times when a program
grabs the console so tightly that <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Nothing> works.

I had this happen this afternoon while running adobe acrobat reader
through an ssh tunnel. It's in cases like this that a second computer is
handy so you can ssh in to fix things, which is what I did.

> Sad.  Control of memory leakage
> has long been a hallmark of Unix
> and Linux.

Unix and Linux, as opposed to what? Actually the whole mozilla family of
browsers are notorious for leaking memory regardless of the platform,
although some blame must be assigned to the OS for permitting it.

Actually, in some cases, it could be the display driver and/or the
windowmanager/ desktop environment. Generally I think that if killing
all instances of the application and then restarting it clears things up
then I would say it was a case of the application "fouling it's own
nest". In my experience periodically (every couple of days, depending on
usage) closing all instances of firefox helps keep these problems at bay.

> Using the supplied
> memory control routines you wonder
> how the application writers get it
> wrong.  But then,  I suppose Firefox
> could be tight,  and the plugins are
> the problem?

The flash-player plugin is notorious for this. I also sometimes find
that flash "enhanced" web pages will grab and hold my sound card so that
I get "device busy" errors when I try to play music or movies. For these
and other reasons I recommend the flashblock addin.

Raymond McLaughlin

>   There are lots of them,
> and who knows who wrote some of
> them.
> 
>     -Bob