Re: [Hampshire] Skype fails and takes out Gutsy

On 31/01/2008, Peter Salisbury <peterthevicar@???> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having converted SWMBO's PC to Ubuntu I am now embarrassed that one
> much used app, skype, is misbehaving big time. After a minute or so
> of use (with a USB headset), Skype just stops working. After a
> further short delay it then disappears from the GUI. The strange
> thing is that it leaves an apparently working system but with some
> very odd behaviour:
>
> 1) You can't restart Skype, it says there is another instance running.
> 2) killall -9 skype can be issued as often as you like with no error
> message
> 3) ps ax fails to complete, hanging whichever terminal runs the
> command. Even killall -9 ps from another terminal doesn't get the ps
> terminal back.
> 4) pgrep and pkill also hang
>
> The only way back I've found is to shut down the PC (but normal
> shutdown doesn't work, presumably because of the unkillable skype) so
> you end up just switching off - nasty! I've tried 3 different
> versions of Skype so I think it's quite likely to be a USB sound
> problem rather than a problem specifically with Skype.
>
> It's hard to investigate when the basic tools stop working! Can anyone
> think what might be happening? Is there any way of getting ps
> information direct from /sys or /proc or other magic to help find out
> what's going on?
>
> TIA, Peter
>
This sounds like a kernel level bug.
ps -ax failing is normally a kernel level problem.

Try using commands like
dmesg
and look in the /var/log/syslog to look for any oops.

Which kernel version are you using?
uname -a

James