So, the GUI on my trusty G4 has completely frozen. An app was running a little slow while performing a complex operation, so I decided to switch to IE to look something up while I waited.
I clicked on IE in the dock to bring it to the foreground, and the whole thing just stopped. Clock stopped, Dock frozen with IE magnified, etc..
I can still move the mouse around, but that's about it. All of the background processes, however, appear to be running. It's still serving web pages, the screen still sleeps and will wake with mouse activity, I can SSH into the box just fine.
I was thinking that I'd just kill the Finder and Dock processes to see if that'd bring things back to life, but about the ONLY command that doesn't work is ps. Whenever I do a ps, it just hangs and never completes.
So, any ideas? I could just reboot the box, but I was in the middle of something I'd rather not lose (and I've got some nice uptime going, too). Any way to kill a process without knowing the PID?
Any suggestions about how to get this machine responding again with terminal tools would be greatly appreciated!
I clicked on IE in the dock to bring it to the foreground, and the whole thing just stopped. Clock stopped, Dock frozen with IE magnified, etc..
I can still move the mouse around, but that's about it. All of the background processes, however, appear to be running. It's still serving web pages, the screen still sleeps and will wake with mouse activity, I can SSH into the box just fine.
I was thinking that I'd just kill the Finder and Dock processes to see if that'd bring things back to life, but about the ONLY command that doesn't work is ps. Whenever I do a ps, it just hangs and never completes.
So, any ideas? I could just reboot the box, but I was in the middle of something I'd rather not lose (and I've got some nice uptime going, too). Any way to kill a process without knowing the PID?
Any suggestions about how to get this machine responding again with terminal tools would be greatly appreciated!