Installation and Configuration Guide for Linux® Workstations

Visual Effects and Finishing Troubleshooting
Killing an Application
If a Visual Effects and Finishing application hangs, but you can still interact with the operating system, you
can terminate it using either a custom command alias for your application, or the generic Linux kill
command in conjunction with the application’s process ID.
WARNING These procedures should only be used if the application is hung or otherwise not responding. Killing
processes can cause system problems.
When you install a Visual Effects and Finishing application, a special command alias is defined that can be
used to kill all Visual Effects and Finishing application processes at once:
1 Open a terminal, and type one of the following commands:
■ kf to kill Flame, Flint or Flare
■ ks to kill Smoke
■ ki to kill Inferno
■ kc to kill Backdraft Conform
2 To verify that all application-related processes have been killed, type: \ps -fu . This displays information about all active processes, including the application with which each
process is associated, and a process ID number. If all application processes have been successfully killed,
this command should return no results.
WARNING Never restart an application if there are still processes left over from a previous session. If some
processes persist after using the kill alias, perform the following procedure to kill them individually.
Use the kill Linux command to kill processes individually, using their process ID number:
1 Press Alt+F3 to send the application to the background.
2 Open a terminal and type: ps -fu . This command displays information
about all active processes, including the application with which each process is associated, and a process
ID number.
3 Determine the process ID number of the Visual Effects and Finishing application.
4 At the command line, type: kill where is the process number
you determined in the previous step. This command terminates the Visual Effects and Finishing process
that is currently executing. There may be more than one Visual Effects and Finishing process running
at any time. For example, there may be one process per CPU, plus some additional processes to manage
the framestore. Kill each of these processes.
5 Restart the application.
Troubleshoot the filesystem
This section describes some common filesystem problems and steps you can take to solve them. When
troubleshooting storage or wire issues, start by verifying that Stone and Wire processes are running properly,
and by checking the log files.
Advanced Configuration and Troubleshooting | 69