Sometimes applications crashes, freeze or otherwise develop an appetite for every last byte of system resources. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
When an application ‘crashes’ it usually doesn’t require any input from you (other than banging your head against the wall at any unsaved work now lost).
But applications that decide to ‘hang’ or ‘freeze’ not only get in the way of you carrying on with whatever you were doing but can often max out your system resources – leaving you with no option but to reboot or nose-dive into the command line.
That’s where FlashFreeze by Sergey ‘shnatsel’ Davidoff is of use.
FlashFreeze
Flash Freeze is a small Unity Launcher-based app that allows to force quit, freeze or freeze an rogue application quickly and conveniently.
Although similar to the ‘force quit’ applet we recently featured on OMG! Ubuntu!, FlashFreeze also adds ‘freezing’ and ‘unfreezing’ options via a Unity quicklist.
Install
FlashFreeze works in Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 and can be installed by adding the following PPA (Personal Package Archive) to your Software Sources: –
ppa:shnatsel/flashfreeze
After adding the PPA run an update and install ‘flash freeze‘ from the Ubuntu Software Centre.