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[BruceM]

Like some other folk, I sometimes get an Activity hung while it's "Starting..."; it just blinks forlornly forever!  (This happens with Write, it seems, when it tries to open anything but plain txt or a file it has created, but I have also had Browse and even Terminal hang this way.)  I know that I can Stop my other activities and reboot, but I'm hoping for a way of killing hung activities without rebooting.  Presumably, this would be through the Terminal, but I'm reluctant to start killing processes without knowing what I'm doing!

Thanks for any suggestions,
Bruce

[jenpc]

One way to kill the activity is, as you expected, from the Terminal.  From the terminal you can do:

• ps -ef | grep sugar-activity

to get a list of the sugar activities currently running and their process numbers.  This prints out in a tabular format.  The first column is the process owner (e.g. root or olpc) and the second column is the process number.  Suppose your process number is 1471.  Then the command to enter to kill that process is

• kill 1471

Make sure you enter the process number from the 2nd column (the left-most number) and not the one in the 3rd column.

If the process owner is root, then you would first need to "su" to become the superuser before you could kill the process.  However, from what I've seen the sugar activities run as olpc not as root.

Hope this helps!

-Jen

[Jovi]

Another trick to kill "stuck" Activities is to restart Sugar. This is a little quicker than rebooting, but probably slower than any other methods. However, it should be very effective, as Sugar will take all of the Activities with it.

You'll want to stop any Activities that are working OK before doing this, since they'll be killed too.

Press the "ctrl", "alt", and "erase" keys all at the same time. (Or, "erase the diamonds", if that's easier to remember.)

(For you X-Windows users out there, if this sounds familiar, it should. We're killing the X server, which Sugar acts as the "window manager" for.)

[BruceM]

Thanks to Jen and Jovi for helpful suggestions!

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