[NTLUG:Discuss] Navigator Problems

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Friday, December 1, WILLIAM PEARSON did write:

> Hello,
> 
> I run Red Hat 7.0 and Netscape Naviagor 4.75. When I write an email on
> Hotmail that tends to get rather long. My hard drive starts going crazy and
> the computer essentially locks up forcing me to hit the reset button. Is
> this a known problem with 4.75 or is a Hotmail problem or a Red Hat
> Problem??
> 
> I'm still able to move the mouse around, although it doesn't show movement
> except for about once a minute. Unable to kill Netscape to end the task, so
> resetting is the only alternative. Any ideas?

I've occasionally seen this behavior with Netscape on other versions of
RedHat, but not in a fashion I could reproduce consistently.

My suspicion: netscape is a buggy resource hog, and there's not much you
can do about it.

As far as fixing it: the fact that you can still move the mouse indicates
that you've got a degree of responsiveness from the system, so
power-cycling shouldn't be necessary.  What means have you tried to kill
netscape?

A couple of possibilities that don't involve reboots:

* Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get out to a console.  Log in and kill netscape, possibly
  with -9.  (This would be preferable, since it shouldn't affect your other
  X clients.)

* If that doesn't work, try Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server.  I've
  occasionally seen Netscape hang around for quite some time after its X
  connection is broken, so you may need to log back in and kill netscape
  manually, as above.

HTH,

Richard