On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 16:12 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
> I was running VMWare and the program inside of Windows has crashed.
> (Or maybe Windows crashed or maybe VMWare crashed - I cannot tell.)
>
> Gentoo is still alive and I can log in and look around but the
> mouse on that computer but its mouse is frozen so I cannot do anything
> at its screen. It seems the keyboard is dead also.
So can you do things once logged in? Which screen are you talking
about? Sounds like you're host is locked up, not just the guest?
> top says there's nothing going on. No CPU cycles at all.
>
> Is there a way for me to ask Linux to talk to VMWare and see if it
> can shut itself down before I hit the reset button?
as in "tell VMWare to do a windows shutdown"? Not that I'm aware of.
killall -15 vmware
will send the SIGTERM to all vmware named processes. (You may need to
use vmware-workstation, or just use ps to get the PID). If that doesn't
work, follow up with a
killall -9 vmware
Then if you're still stuck, gnome-session-save with either --logout or
--force-logout should log you out nicely. If that gets stuck, try
kill -15 -1
from your user login (not root) to kill all your processess. Again,
maybe a
kill -9 -1
is required. It will log you out of the ssh session.
If that fails (as you can tell I've done this before) try an acpi
shutdown. If that fails, use the magic SysRq, but I don't think you'll
need to go that far since you can ssh in.
--
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>
Simon: "My God - you're like a trained ape. Without the training."
--Episode #7, "Jaynestown"
