Is there a way to see non-responding process? So that in the event of system freeze, we won't kill the wrong process?

Technically speaking, Linux rarely has “non-responding” processes, as it's almost always possible to send a signal to a process in order to kill it.

You can use the “top” command in a terminal window to list the processes in the system. You can even use this over a serial terminal if a process has taken out the console with it.

As far as system freezes go, if you entire system freezes up then you won't be able to do anything much. It's far more common to have the terminal lock up; you can usually kill an X-windows terminal with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. If you're using a text terminal then you can also get back to the terminal by sending SIGSTOP (the “stop” signal, used to pause a process); pressing Ctrl+Z normally does this.

If it's just that an X-windows program has stopped working, you can run the “xkill” command, which will change the mouse cursor to a skull-and-crossbones symbol. You can then click on the window that isn't responding and kill the just application that owns that window.

Hope that's of some help,

— Robert J. Lee

Thanks for the reply.

What I encounter is while doing my presentation file half way, mouse and keyboard are not responding. But surprisingly, I can still alt+ctrl+f2, then I killed my wineserver and everything is back to normal. Just that my file are not saved

Wine is still beta software (and likely to remain so for a while). The best advice I can give you is to update wine and see if that bug has been fixed.

Alternatively, try using a native Linux application; e.g. OpenOffice.org supports most common Windows “office” file formats.