On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 14:56, Andrew Robinson wrote: > andrew 4886 1 0 Jan11 ? 00:00:00 [gnome-session <defunct>] > > The name "gnome-session" looked promising, so I tried a 'kill -(harrison > ford) 4886'. There appeared to be no effect.
Try to login (ssh or console) as andrew and run: kill -KILL -1
That should kill every process andrew has permission to kill. DO NOT ever do this as root. ;-)
You appear to have many defunct (zombie) processes. Zombies may or may not cause problems. They aren't actually running. The defunct programs are dead but waiting for their parent to free them. The parent process that launched those processes "forgot" to clean up when they exited. (But it sounds like you know that.)
You might try killing gdm and see if that frees them. ("init 3" and check your process list. "init 5" to get back up to graphical.) Otherwise, they'll probably show up in the process list until init is killed (i.e. reboot). It's extremely rare for your entire login session to zombie. Something strange must've happened; perhaps a hung mount command or something.
Thanks. When I left the computer the night before, it was running up2date. Apparently I'm having some of the same problems with up2date that I see others complaining about.
Andrew Robinson
