Re: safe emergency shutdown?

[Peter Christensen <christenpet@snip.net>]

Michael,

Thanks for your help.  Even if I don't get anywhere with this, I've learned a 
few more commands!  I checked through some of the logs but there was nothing 
that stood out as an obvious error.  I'm going to see if there's anything in 
the kde websites and mailing lists that might help.  At the very least I'm 
hoping that I can restore kde to the way it was before I tried to add the new 
application to the panel.  At this point the panel is missing some functions, 
like the buttons that show the applications that are running currently.  If I 
can't restore this, would it be possible to remove, then re-install kde, or 
is this likely to get me into more trouble?

I started "top" in a console after issuing the "shutdown -f +5".  Then I 
re-created the bug by simply trying to click and drag the new icon from one 
location on the kde panel to another.  The kdeinit process quickly went from 
a low percentage up to 95.7%.  I copied the following from the "top" output.  
At this point the %cpu from kdeinit was 79.1

 PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
  688 peter     14   0 10724  10M  8592 R    79.1  4.1   1:17 kdeinit
  968 peter      1   0  8316 8316  7412 S     9.9  3.2   0:55 kdeinit
  283 root      -8 -10 24744  21M  2488 S <   7.0  8.7   4:36 XFree86
 1187 root       6   0   956  956   748 R     3.2  0.3   2:22 top
  694 peter      1   0  7760 7760  7024 S     0.3  3.0   0:18 kdeinit
  684 peter      0   0  7840 7840  7060 S     0.1  3.0   0:07 kdeinit
 1188 peter      0   0  8292 8292  7376 S     0.1  3.2   0:14 kdeinit
    1 root       0   0   488  488   424 S     0.0  0.1   0:05 init
   2 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kflushd
    3 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kupdate
    4 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd
    5 root       0   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
   92 daemon     0   0   432  432   356 S     0.0  0.1   0:00 portmap
  183 root       0   0   784  784   668 S     0.0  0.3   0:00 syslogd
  186 root       0   0   856  856   412 S     0.0  0.3   0:00 klogd

Michael wrote:
> You can start a 'top' in another console ( alt+arrow right/ left to change
> console-tty's ) to get information about process status.
> Note anything that looks curious for your next report to the list...

Thanks,
Peter Christensen