Re: [Hampshire] Skype fails and takes out Gutsy

On Wednesday 30 Jan 2008, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 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

Thanks James. Nothing reported in syslog, messages or dmesg. I did
notice that plugging and unplugging the USB headset doesn't produce
the expected messages when in this state which may also point to a
USB fault.

Peter