If you find yourself running ps several times in a row, trying to watch things change, what you probably want is top. top displays a continuously updated process listing, along with some useful summary information:

$ top
 10:02pm  up 19 days,  6:24,  8 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.05, 0.00
75 processes: 74 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  1.3% user,  2.5% system,  0.0% nice, 96.0% idle
Mem:   256020K av,  226580K used,   29440K free,       0K shrd,    3804K buff
Swap:  136544K av,   80256K used,   56288K free                  101760K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
  628 root      16   0  213M  31M  2304 S       0  1.9 12.5  91:43 X
26934 chouser   17   0  1272 1272  1076 R       0  1.1  0.4   0:00 top
  652 chouser   11   0 12016 8840  1604 S       0  0.5  3.4   3:52 gnome-termin
  641 chouser    9   0  2936 2808  1416 S       0  0.1  1.0   2:13 sawfish