How to terminate rogue processes (e.g. Opera crash)

[offbeatdave]

Just had a situation where Opera crashed and I couldn't exit from it. All that I could do was move the pointer around. I'd tried a 'killall tango' via telnet but, as I thought it might, this left the pointer on screen, Opera running in the background and the Joggler unusable. I didn't want to reboot the Joggler as this one is very temperamental (it took me three days to reflash it and get it re-PnP-ed this week following a foolhardy reboot).

Anyway, a quick bit of Google-ing led me to the solution which I've popped below for anyone who may need it (and for my future reference!):

Telnet-ed in and ran

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ps aux | less

to display a list of running processes (exited the list by via :q when I reached the bottom).
I then found the rouge instance of Opera and its process number and ran

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kill -9 xxxxx

where xxxxx was the process number corresponding to Opera. I had tried without the -9 but that didn't work. Apparently the -9 ensures that the command is executed. This language for stopping processes from running is all rather aggressive isn't it?!

[Mevi]

I didn't want to reboot the Joggler as this one is very temperamental (it took me three days to reflash it and get it re-PnP-ed this week following a foolhardy reboot).

My two Openpeak Jogglers are 'delicate' and don't like to be messed about with. One is currently bricked and the other only boots XP and not boot either Buzz's Linux or the internal OS... many many reflashes later. I will eventually get PNP MKII working on at least ONE of my jogglers!!

[gegs]

...I didn't want to reboot the Joggler as this one is very temperamental (it took me three days to reflash it and get it re-PnP-ed this week following a foolhardy reboot)...

Do you have any idea why this should be? I also had to reflash after a re-boot (shortly after installing PnP MkII for the first time). I used the original PnP reboot facility fairly often and never had a problem with it. Maybe I was just lucky.

[offbeatdave]

Out my six Jogglers, the 2 o2 ones have always being indestructible, as has one of the Openpeak ones. 2 openpeak ones are usually OK but have been known to throw a wobbly on the odd occasion. The Openpeak one in question is very prone to not reflashing correctly for some reason. No idea why through!

[roobarb!]

Out my six Jogglers, the 2 o2 ones have always being indestructible, as has one of the Openpeak ones. 2 openpeak ones are usually OK but have been known to throw a wobbly on the odd occasion. The Openpeak one in question is very prone to not reflashing correctly for some reason. No idea why through!

It would be great to figure it out, especially if I could tweak the reflashing tool to fix it, but my guess is that there are teeny hardware differences that have been tweaked over the life of the product, which would explain why the O2 ones are perhaps more solid than the OpenPeak ones (which must be earlier revisions).

Wouldn't it be nice if someone from O2 or OpenPeak involved in the Joggler's product development popped up on here one day and gave us a little background?

Anyone?

This is your invitation to say "Hi!" if you're reading this!