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I was using a small Linux distro that was running X11 with JWM as its window manager. I was browsing a directory when all of a sudden the mouse froze and the keyboard became unresponsive. The caps lock and scroll lock lights are flashing.

What does this mean... and is there anything I can do about it?

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Is there anything else you can tell us about the environment? – Steven D Nov 8 '10 at 3:06
@Steven: The distro is quite old - PuppyLinux 1.06 - and the computer is even older - an old Pentium MMX running at 200MHz. – Nathan Osman Nov 8 '10 at 6:33

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

The kernel has crashed your pc, the reason could be anything...

Good question is how you collect the crash data, so you know what crashed it.

But the only thing to do is to reboot the pc.

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It magic sysrq support is compiled into the kernel you may be able to use some of those features before rebooting. – camh Nov 8 '10 at 9:52

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