Re: Can't restart certain crashed applications without rebooting (in this case Noatun)

Hmm, as is too often the case, after sending an email seeking, I start
to get some other clues--I found a suggestion to restart arts--I tried
that, still no luck so I'm still looking for help (but maybe I have
some kind of clue now).

Randy Kramer

On Monday 21 June 2010 09:38:55 am Randy Kramer wrote:
Sorry this is so long--maybe I can summarize the problem here, then
you can go on and read the background and a more detailed explanation
of the problem:

Sometimes after a program hangs (in this case noatun), I have trouble
restarting it without rebooting my entire system. I do look for all
the processes associated with the application (noatun, using ps -Al |
grep noatun) and kill them, with either kill -9 or kill -15, but
afterwards, when I try to start the application, I just get a
spinning hourglass indication in the taskbox (on the taskbar) and a
small bouncing blue ball elsewhere on the screen, both of which
eventually disappear without having started the application.

Hmm, maybe with that you don't even need the Background and Problem
listed below. I've tried googling, but don't really have a good clue
for what to google.

A dead end (I think):

Oh, wait, I might have a clue: now I try to start noatun in a
terminal (with & or without) and I very quickly (sometimes) get exit
255--hmm, on the next try I didn't get the exit 255--what does exit
255 mean?:

rhk@s17:~$ noatun &
[2] 11248
[1] Exit 255 noatun
rhk@s17:~$

Well, I haven't found out what exit 255 means, but I don't think it
matters, it doesn't consistently happen, just sometimes.

Background:

This is surely not a Debian specific question, but I'll try asking
here to see if anyone can give me one or more hints--I've tried to do
some googling, but really don't have a good clue for what to google.

I've had the same thing happen for applications besides Noatun (iirc)
(and on Linuxes that I used before installing Debian 5.0), but
because the current problem is Noatun, I'll mention Noatun in this
example.

I was running Noatun and it hung. It may have been something I
did--specifically, at the time it hung, I had the playlist up and was
unchecking checkboxes on the playlist.

In an effort to restart noatun, I looked (using ps -Al | grep noatun)
for all noatun processes and killed them with (the first time)
kill -9. Later (on subsequent attempts), I tried kill -15.

Either one wipes out all the processes with noatun in the name.

The problem:

Here's the problem: when I go to restart noatun, it won't restart.
On the taskbar (is that the right name in KDE) I see a task labeled
noatun seemingly attempt to start--I see an hourglass spinning, and
elsewhere on my screen I see some sort of small bouncing blue ball,
but after 15 seconds or so, both disappear and noatun hasn't
restarted. If I go look at the processes using ps -Al | grep noatun,
I find something like the following:

s17:~# ps -Al | grep noatun
1 S 1000 11039 3039 0 80 0 - 8589 - ? 00:00:00
noatun 1 S 1000 11040 11039 0 80 0 - 9670 - ?
00:00:00 noatun 1 S 1000 11141 3039 0 80 0 - 8589 - ?
00:00:00 noatun 1 Z 1000 11142 11141 0 80 0 - 0 - ?
00:00:00 noatun <defunct>
s17:~#

If I wipe those out (using kill -9 or kill -15), they disappear, but
when I try to noatun again I get the same result.

In the past, the only way I found to recover from a situation like
this was to reboot. (Potentially just restarting KDE might also
solve the problem, but from my point of view, restarting KDE is as
drastic a solution as rebooting, so when I think about restarting KDE
I just go ahead and do a (cold) reboot with the hope of cleaning up
any other possible "garbage" that might be floating around in my
system.)

I see that the one process is a Zombie. I've googled on things like
zombie, process, noatun, restart, and combinations thereof--even a
good suggestion on appropriate search terms might get me started here
(of course, a nice clear explanation and course of action would be
nicer).

Thanks!
Randy Kramer



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