Sunday, September 6, 2009

Linux Sytem Frozen? Re-boot Safely With REISUB

I know a Linux system is rarely completely frozen but I seem to manage finding the rare moment. If you have been reading these posts for a while you will remember that I am doing a lot of work on a eight year old Toshiba laptop. To refresh memories this is a P3 475Mghz with a whopping 192 MB of RAM. Unfortunately I cannot up the amount of RAM. So my solution is to run AntiX, a lighter version of Mepis, to conserve system resources. But I still have issues once in a while when I get too many tabs open in Iceweasel. I have had the system freeze and I had to re-boot. Well today I learned how to do this safely and I want to share this with you. In the old days of Unix and mainframes programmers included some very low level commands and one of the is REISUB. When using this set of commands the system has a chance to shutdown and re-boot safely preventing system files from being corrupted.  To use the commands press the Alt+SysReq (Print Screen on some systems) + each letter individually in the command allowing a few seconds in between each for the command to complete. When you are done the system will re-boot and you are back in business. I recommend reading the Wikipedia article for more details and information on more commands.

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