so i installed something to do with this CPAN and then ran 'perl -MCPAN -e 'install DBI' everything seemed like it was going fine and it was copying files to wherever it needed to. Now i cant click on anything on the screen and its completely locked up. ?

a complete noob thing to say i know, but hey thats me!!!

Tried switching to a different console?

i'd love too except some dipshit here at the office took the red hat cd's and lost them so to re-install red hat right now is impossible until the company gets a new set of cd's which isn't going to happen any time soon. Also, the reason i switched to slackware cause if i lose the cd there, well, i just burn another one.

...and is your keyboard blocked? try to switch to another virtual console, as Poetic said. (CTRL+ALT+F2, F3, ...)
You don't need any installation CD or reinstalling

Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go to a virtual console. Log in as root and kill the process that caused the desktop to freeze. That is: type

#ps -e

that will show the processes (programs) currently running. There will be at least one about perl or cpan (I'm not familiar with CPAN so I don't know the exact name of the program). In the first column there is the processe's PID, say 4623 (it may be 4 or 5 digit number). In that case just type

#kill 4623

Then

#ps -e

again to see if it has really died. If it is still running type

#kill -9 4623

kill -9 stands for nuuuuuuuuuuuuuke
No process can survive that.


All that providing your keyboard hasn't frozen as well. If it has you will have to log in from a remote computer via ssh or telnet and do the killing.
If that is not an option, ...........................


BTW, linux didn't crash on you, some application did. At most some desktop (kde or gnome or whatever you're using).

In any case, do not reinstall. I'm sure you didn't damage the system beyond repair. I'm sure you didn't damage the system at all. In the world of linux, not every glitch means reinstalling the OS

P.S. Once you kill the desired process, return to desktop by CTRL+ALT+F7

Lempour and klios got what I meant I should have said another virtual console, but what they said should work out juuuust fine. Either way, let us know!

already did a reboot, seemed to work.

plus it's a virtual machine so ctrl+alt will release me back to win2k

If you released the virtual machine and opened up another session, it should work fine, then you can do as suggested above ("su"-ing into root and stopping the runaway process)