Hey, well i finally decided to see what all the commotion was about and try linux myself. So far Ive been very pleased except Im having one problem(possibly 2). My distribution is Redhat Linux 7.3 (Ive heard this is the best redhat version). The other day I was doing some programming on nedit, and my hard drive seemed to working like crazy, even though the only program I had open was the simple text editor.

I thought maybe a reboot would work (sounds like windows?), and it did for a while, except today I came home from school, and my computer was frozen on the screensaver. This is very unlike what I hear linux should be like, and I dont think its a problem with my hardware because im running dual boot with windows XP, and I have never had XP crash on me.

I was thinking maybe I had some background program running on linux could possibly be my problem. Possibly a media player??? I double click an mp3 player in nautilus the other day, and it started playing, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldnt seem to find what program was playing the mp3 (I do have mpg123 installed but im not sure if it used that player), and so I couldnt shut it down. I had to resort to rebooting the computer again. Im a newb so do applications run in the background (and hide themselves) in linux? Is there a universal file that loads all programs/services at the boot-up that I can post here so you guys can tell me if theres anything there that shouldnt be there?

Please give me your suggestions.
Martin Konecny

the kde and gnome environments run a lot of background services.
you can do a forced exit out of X with control alt backspace. if
that doesn't work, your machine may actually be frozen. that would
probably be a kernel issue. most apps can't freeze linux like in windows.
X is an exception, cause it can grap and freeze up your mouse and keyboard
input, keeping you from doing anything. you can look at background services
with top.
try a different version or distro of linux, if you are getting freezes.

try not using desktop environments, cuse it sounds like its background servives u dont need (in reality the only serveice that should be running in background is syslogd and a few other loging programs), /etc/rc.d has files wich are scripts for what to do when in a certain runlvl /etc/initab tells what scripts to run at that lvl, /etc/X11/xinit/ has 1 file that controls what progrmas are laoded when x starts up, as for not using the desktop evironments, just piece the fiels together yourelf and dont get a blaot (bascialy all you need is a window manager, a file amnager, and whatever else you want form here like media players picture viewers gimp for image editing/making

As whansard said, use the command 'top' to find the offending process. Get the process ID#, then kill -9 pid#.

Actually, you may even wonder if it is the screensaver's fault.

You asked if Linux can run processess in the background. Yes, it is completely multiuser and multitasking. Several different users can use your computer at once.

Open a console and run the 'top' command next time your harddrive does that.

I bet updatedb is running. Stupid updatedb program has loused up countless
games of Unreal Tournament for me since I switched to Linux.