Problems and Solutions

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One of my windows seems to be hanging, and it isn’t even a surfer. It won’t do anything, not even close.

I know the problem well. No matter what you do to the window, it won’t respond; it won’t even go away. Yes, this happens, but fortunately this is a minor problem that can be dealt with in a number of ways. One of the following should dothe trick:

  • Just wait a few seconds. It could be that your system will recognize the problem and pop up a window telling you what you already know: The application isn’t responding. If such a window does appear, just click the Kill button, and you’ll be ready to go. If you try to run the application again, it should start up; if it’s a Nautilus window giving you trouble, it should automatically restart itself once you kill it. If after killing your application you can’t open it again, restart your system. All will be well then.

  • If all is still not well after that little exercise in patience, try using the Force Quit button you added to your panel in Chapter Just click the button, and the cursor will turn into a crosshair. Place the crosshair over the window that is causing you grief, and then click again. Press ESC if you decide that you don’t want to use the killer crosshair after all.

  • If that approach also fails for some reason (or if you are a Red Hat Linux 9 user who doesn’t have the Force Quit button), go to the Main menu and select Run Application. In the dialog box type xkill. Your cursor will then turn into a funny-looking square within a square. Place that square over the misbehaving window, and click the left mouse button. The program, or window, will then shut down. If you decide that you don’t want to click on anything with your square-within-a-square cursor, just right-click, and your cursor will return to normal.

  • Yet another alternative is to go to your Main menu and select System Tools > System Monitor. The System Monitor window will then open, showing all the running processes (and you’ll be surprised how many there are). Find the culprit in the list, and select it by clicking once. Then click the End Process button at the bottom of the window, and the misbehaving program will close. Most likely, you will never have to go through this procedure, unless you want to, of course. Still it isn’t a bad thing to know about.

I sometimes get a message saying that this or that GNOME application has unexpectedly quit. After that the program starts back up by itself. Is this normal?

No, it’s not “normal” as normal goes, but it does sometimes happen in GNOME. No need to worry, as it seems to be taking care of things itself.

My GNOME Panel is gone or not responding.

Hmmm. Seems to me that the easiest thing to do is just press CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE together. Your GNOME session will end, and you will be back at your graphical login screen so that you can start anew. This should work in KDE (or any other GUI) as well, if something of a similar nature happens to you.

Holy molasses! Everything seems to have gooped up and I can’t get anything done.

Yes, yes, ghosts all over your screen, repeated window frames, menus seem to bleed into windows, and it all just seems like an unsightly pudding on your monitor, eh? My first suggestion is to just sit there for a minute or two. Your machine might just be too slow to handle things fast enough, and thus just needs some time to catch up. If things stay that way, however, just as with the previous problem, try the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE keys together, and you’ll be back at your graphical login screen without the goop.

My windows all leave trails behind them when I move them. Looks cool, but I’d prefer it didn’t happen.

Your video color depth is probably more than your hardware setup can handle. Try downing it from millions of colors to thousands of colors. As explained in Chapter 19, you can do this via the Display Settings window, which you can open by going to the Main menu and selecting System Settings > Display.

If that doesn’t do the trick, try reducing your screen resolution too (in the Main menu select Preferences > Screen Resolution). If that doesn’t cut the hay either, try adding more system memory (or getting a new video card with lots of memory built in).

Blackout! My GUI has disappeared, and I’m suddenly stuck in all-text mode. I want to get out, but I don’t even know how I got here. Take me back to Kansas, Great Wizard!

Yes, this is a fright the first time around, though it fortunately has only happened to me once. Your screen is black, and it just reads [username@localhost username] $. It looks like a dreadful throwback to the scary days of DOS, even though it is Linux. Ouch! But don’t despair, Dorothy. There is a simple way around this.

Your whole screen has become one giant Terminal window. So first become root in the usual way, and then type in the following command and press ENTER:

/sbin/shutdown -r now

The -r flag tells the shutdown command to restart after shutting down, so, naturally enough, if you don’t want to restart the machine, you can omit this flag. The now part at the end tells the shutdown command to do its stuff now, not later, which, given the circumstances, is no doubt what you want it to do.

After doing all that, things will go as they should: The usual shutdown output will display on the screen, and the machine will stop, restart, and return you to your friendly graphical login screen. You’re back in Kansas again, Dorothy . . . and Toto too.

Ghostly problem. My login screen is all white. All I can see is the cursor blinking in the center of the screen. What should I do?

Yes, this happens sometimes. Fortunately it is all quite temporary. Just go through the usual login steps, entering your account name and password as if you could see the login window. Despite the sudden case of whiteout, everything still functions as it should, and the login screen should be back to normal the next time you come to it.

When I leave my computer running and step out of the room for a while, I often come back to find that my machine’s logged me out and I’m back at my login screen. What gives?

Assuming that the cause is not one of your children or a mischievous coworker, then the culprit is probably one of your screensaver modules. There are a couple of ways to find out which module is causing the problem.

The first way is the trial-and-error method, by which you turn off all the modules and then enable them one by one, letting each one do its thing for a while to see if it is the problem. If your problem doesn’t recur, you can enable the next one and check it. And so on. The other way is to simply enable only one module and use it for a while. If your problem doesn’t recur, then you know that that module is safe. When you get sick of it, change to another module and use that one for a while. Eventually, you’ll discover the broken module.

My printouts look lousy. The text is all jagged, and paragraphs get blurry here and there. What can I do?

First, make sure that your problem isn’t just a dirty inkjet printer. Try cleaning it first. If that doesn’t work, try trashing your present print queue and creating a new one. Be sure to use the default driver for your printer. If the printouts still look lousy, try a different driver and see if that does the trick.

I can’t seem to eject my CD!

Good, an easy one. First, make sure that there are no open Nautilus windows that show the contents of your CD. If there are open windows, close them and try to eject the disk again. If that doesn’t work, open a Terminal window, type umount /mnt/cdrom and press ENTER. If that doesn’t do the trick, try doing the same thing after becoming root. And if all that fails, just restart your machine with the CD stuck in your drive, and right after the machine restarts (and before you get to any of the Fedora screens) push the eject button on the CD drive — not the usual Linux way of doing things, but it works.

What happened? I suddenly can’t burn CDs anymore.

If you can read CDs without a hitch, but you just can’t burn them all of a sudden, the problem could be due to a USB storage device. The Linux kernel treats both CD drives and USB storage devices as SCSI devices (even if they are not). If you start up your machine with a USB storage device plugged in, the system might set up the SCSI devices so that the USB storage device is listed as scsibus0, and the CD drive as scsibus0. When you try to burn a CD, the CD burner looks for the drive at scsibusIf it’s not there, the burner doesn’t know what to do.

You can check to see if this is your problem by opening a Terminal window, becoming root, and then typing in cdrecord -scanbus and pressing ENTER. If your CD drive is listed as scsibus1 rather than scsibus0, you’ll know that you’ve identified the problem. To solve this problem, just unmount your USB storage device, unplug the device from your machine, and then restart the machine. Everything should be back to normal once your system is up and running again. At that point, you can also plug your USB storage device back in, if you like.

Why can I hear sound when I play audio streams or audio files on my hard disk, but I can’t hear anything when I try to play an audio CD?

Sounds to me as if you installed a new sound card and forgot to connect the CD to it. Your CD drive should have three sets of wires coming out the back: a multicolor set with a translucent white connector at the end, a very wide and flat set of gray wires that are molded together so that they look like the biggest and ugliest tapeworm in the history of tapeworms, and a pair of normal-sized black wires ending in a rather small flat connector. This last connector (see Figure 20-1 on the next page) is probably still connected to your motherboard. You should connect it instead to the appropriate slot (usually labeled CD) on the new sound card. If you need a bit more help, I have a set of instructions on how to install a sound card that you can download from my Web site for this book (www.edgy-penguins.org/non-geeks).

click to expand
Figure 20-1: Connecting your CD drive to your new sound card

I followed your directions for installing new icon themes, but nothing happened. You told me to check here if this happens, so . . .

The problem you are experiencing is just one of those system quirks that happens sometimes. Fortunately, it is easily remedied. First, untar the icon file ICON-Tux-n-Tosh-0.1.tar.bz2 (or whatever other file you are trying to install) by double-clicking it and then going through the usual File Roller procedures. This will create a new folder named TuxnTosh (or named for whatever icon set you are installing).

Now open a new Nautilus window, and in the Location text box of that new window type /home/username/.icons and press ENTER. This will bring you to the “hidden” icons folder (as mentioned, your folder name may vary). Finally just drag the TuxnTosh folder from the first window to the .icons window. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to go to the Theme Details window and find the icon set in the list of installed icon themes.

Whoa! I’m seeing all sorts of oily colors pulsating before my eyes, and I feel like there are frogs jumping up and down my spine. I’ve painted half my face blue and I look like the bad seed from an episode of Dragnet. I also have a mad urge to run naked through my local Wal-Mart screaming “Neewollah!”

You’re obviously turning to the wrong place for help, as your problem seems a bit off topic and definitely out of my line of expertise, but I’m relatively sure it all has to do with something you did in high school, unless you’re trying to make a sociopolitical statement of some sort. It also seems that you are well acquainted with the 1956 film classic Picnic, starring Kim Novak and William Holden — a cult film waiting to happen if there ever was one. My advice is to go back and ask the pyWings oracle and see what it has to say. I will merely end now by offering you a heartfelt

Neewollah!

(For those of you who don’t know what this means, see the film.)



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Linux for Non-Geeks. A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
ISBN: 1593270348
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

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