On 22-Apr-99 Razvan Cristian Oprea wrote:>
>
> I've just had a most terrifying experience. Trying to open an Ms Excel
> document with Staroffice 5.0 under KDE (SuSE 6.0), my computer, rock
> stable before, got frozen. Ms Windows frozen like I mean... The only
> think he could recognize was the reset button. I thought it was an
> accident. So after the cold reboot, I tried again with the same
> document. The same thing happened: a message from Staroffice, telling
> me that an error has occured and that my documents have been saved.
> After that, only silence.
> [snip]
> Staroffice is hence really dangerous considering the type of
> access he has to my computer's resources! How is it all this possible??
This looks as though it may not be so much StarOffice freezing the whole
system, as freezing X.
This can also happen with some other applications.[1] When it happens,
mouse and keyboard input to X is impossible, so you can't even switch to
a text console. Nevertheless, the system itself is working, and provided
you have some way to communicate with it which bypasses X you can close
down the running applications and X, and start them again, without having
to even re-boot let alone press the reset button.
Even a serial-port connection to another computer (ancient UNIX style,
and the other computer could be that CP/M museum piece in the back room)
is enough in this case: just log in from the other computer, become root,
and clean up. Naturally, network connection also works.
Of course it may be that you really have frozen the whole system and
nothing whatever will rescue you ... but I think you should try the option
above before coming to that conclusion.
Good luck,
Ted.
[1] WordPerfect-7 used to do it to me. WP-8 seems to be fine, though.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 22-Apr-99 Time: 11:03:36
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