[Wine] Star Sonata: Great start, then crash when accepting missions

[James Mckenzie]

Martin Gregorie <martin at gregorie.org> wrote:
>Sent: Oct 28, 2010 3:51 AM
>To: wine-users at winehq.org
>Subject: Re: [Wine] Star Sonata: Great start, then crash when accepting missions
>
>On Wed, 2010-10-27 at 18:25 -0500, CorazonSierra wrote:
>
>A 'zombie' is a process that has started one or more child processes and
>finished what it needed to do before its children have finished. The
>rules say that it can't exit until its children have all died, so its
>sitting and waiting for them the finish. Of course, if a child locks up
>so it can't exit the zombie will also be there for ever. Next time this
>happens, start a terminal window and run the game from it.

Huh?  That is not what I know.  A Zombie or defunct process is one that did not exit cleanly (I have that with a product I use when I start it up, it spawns all sorts of child processes and four of them do not exit.)  This will 'hang' the process indefinitely.  They just sit around waiting to exit and they do use up processing resources and whatever remaining memory resources.  These should be 'cleaned' up and reported to the originating programmer.  If the Zombies occur in Wine only, they should be reported through Wine's bugzilla.

>Meanwhile, here's a faster way of killing off the zombies. Note down the
>name of one of the zombies (thats the right hand column) and run
>
>killall -u xxx name
>

This is really a rough way to do this and will kill any running ssh/login sessions if you are logged in as that user.  It is better to use reap/preap to kill off the Zombies.

Type in reap or preap then copy/paste the PID of the zombie process(es) separated by spaces.  You should get a series of "Process xxxxx exited with status 0"  If you get any other status this means that the process failed for some reason and that needs to be investigated.  

Hope this helps in troubleshooting what this program is failing.

James McKenzie