ubuntu file copy adventure

[Neil Woolford]

At 17:19 12/11/04, Philippe Landau wrote:
>[...]slower and slower, taking minutes for
>files as small as 100 kB.
>
>the problem in these situations is
>how can i stop ubuntu ?
>
>first i clicked on cancel, after 5 minutes
>this triggered a delete operation,
>which i tried to cancel too.
>3 hours later i was still not able
>to reach the shut down menu
>because ubuntu was still so busy
>with memory paging (i suppose),
>so i pulled the plug :-)
>
>kind regards     philippe

I recently mashed my desktop by looping a remote access VNC session round so
it spawned hundreds of copies of itself.  There was no way to get to the 
GUI shutdown
menu after that, so I used a tty to shut the system down.

Step by step;

1)      Problem on the desktop!!!
2)      Use Control+Alt+F1 to open tty1 (a text terminal).
3)      Log in as someone with administrator privileges, probably yourself.
4)      sudo halt  (There are other commands that will do it, but halt is 
brief and memorable.)
5)      Enter your password at the 'password' prompt.
6)      Watch as the system shuts down in an orderly way...

If that doesn't work, then your system really is in trouble.

Neil


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