[Illumina2]

Just a quick question.... I've just recently installed Ubuntu 8.1 and I left it running overnight to download about 250 MB's of updates , I left it overnight as I topped out my monthly bandwidth and my connection speed was shaped.

This morning before I got up my son decided to try and use the desktop and launched Firefox and the pc has frozen , i'm not sure if its still downloading the updates he said that the update manager said 3 1/2 hours to go and minimized it so I don't know whats going on. Firefox has not loaded and the circular loading icon is frozen . Any suggestions as to what I can do ? I'm happy to wait well in excess of the estimated time to download the packages but what to do if it fails(i suspect it will) to unfreeze when the downloads are finished and to be honest I'm not sure that its still even downloading the updates as the LAN light on my router is on continuously without a flicker all morning but the HDD light on my ancient 1.6GHz P4 shows no activity ?
The pc is totally unresponsive and frozen any suggestions would be appreciated .

[lotuseclat79]

Hi Illumina2,

The key information is: The pc is totally unresponsive and frozen any suggestions would be appreciated . So, there is little to do but reboot, however, it must be done in a safe way.

Assuming that the file: /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq has the character '1' in it from the output of the command (after you reboot):
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
1

Then you can try to do the following:
1. Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.
2. While holding those down, type the following in order. Nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB
3. Watch your computer reboot.

This will stop all programs, unmount all drives, and reboot which is a lot safer than mashing the power button (for 5 seconds) to reboot.

Don't try this if you just want to reboot, and have full control of the computer. A normal reboot, if it can be done, should always be used instead of the REISUB keys.

-- Tom

P.S. Ubuntu 8.10 is version Eight dot Ten, not 8.1

[Illumina2]

Thanks for the help Tom , er I'll do this next time , oops. I'm still having problems , I got my full speed net connection back and did 214MBs of updates totalling 208 updates it was going fine last night however this morning its playing up again .

It took a half dozen boot ups to get to desk top then several reboots to get Firefox to launch , sorry to say all done with a push of the restart button . Problem is each time trying to launch FF the cursor freezes preventing me from trying to see if FF is already running which it shouldn't be as its straight after boot-up and the 1st attempt at launching the browser , before I updated FF froze alot of times and System Monitor said FF was running and I ended the process then it launched.
More than a few times the cursor was frozen which made me unable to open sys monitor.

The pc is generally misbehaving way to much , i re-installed Ubuntu off a checked boot cd and over wrote previous attempts to install Ubuntu by using 100% of the HDD as the new partition and did the full updates as described above .
This is maddening I'm starting to very much think my ancient 1.6GHz P4 is dying either CPU or HDD as this was what was happening to Win2K Pro before I killed it with attempted repair. I fully erased the HDD with Dariks Boot & Nuke before I installed 1st Suse then again before Ubuntu 8.10 , Tom or any one have any thoughts ? Software or Hardware problems ?