Some command line stuff

ok if you ever wanted to stop a program that's frozen, or just get some more info for a program your command line is your best friend.
First off to take care of that pesky frozen program!

In a terminal (xterm, gnome-term, aterm, mrxvt...) type in ps -A | grep

ex. ps -A |grep fire (will locate any process id's that are for firefox)

It will give a line similare to the one below
3510 ? 00:00:39 firefox-bin

The first part of this line is the process id , then who owns the process then the amount of time the process has been running and finally the name of the process.

Next we get rid of that pesky frozen program with the kill command. kill

ex. kill 3510 (to kill the frozen firefox)

Run the ps command again to verify that it has indeed been killed. When successful your second ps command won't show up anything, and your browser should have already disappeared from your desktop.

To get more information about a problematic program and what it's doing try executing it from an terminal window. Simply type the name of the command in at the prompt.

ex. drivel

This will display all the messages of what the program is attempting to do and possibly give some insight as to what the problem is to be fixed. (works fantastic for finding broken dependencies and such!) It's much faster for finding easy fixes than searching the system logs, but not as complete. It can also give you a great clue as to what you're looking for in your logs!

Happy *nixing everyone!

First GVLUG meeting thursday, april 9

Our first LUG meeting will be on Thursday, April 9 from Noon-1:30pm at Main Street Bagel in Grand Junction.
We will be covering an introduction to linux and discussing group meeting details. After that we will be helping those who wish to install linux. Rick and I will both be bringing live/install usb/cd/dvd's to facilitate the installations. If you wish to have linux installed on a laptop or netbook we should be able to help you get everything working. For those of you that want to install on your desktops at home I advise that you stay for the install-fest so that you can see examples and be able to avoid problems.
Well I hope to see plenty of people there!
Joe

LUG in the Grand Valley

Welcome to by blog for the Linux User Group in the Grand Valley. I've decided to create this blog as a place where I can put various information and help for the Linux OS, as well vent frustration at those aspects that I have yet to fully understand lol.

I hope you find what I post here helpful, and if you're interested in joining a linux user group and live within an easy drive to meet in Grand Junction Colorado please visit www.helpmerick.com for now to watch for news and info for joining.

Rick Castellini is a great guy that I met with yesterday for the first time. His site is a great Q&A site that offers some great content, from tips to advise his site is a must have bookmark for all computer users that want to use the tools, and don't want all the "techie" babble to go with it.

With any luck we will be able to put together a website and forum for members soon. Until then watch www.helpmerick.com and this blog for more updates.