Today I experienced a rather strange problem in Ubuntu. It crashed. Actually it wasn’t completely crashed, the mouse clicks weren’t working, I couldn’t switch using Alt+Tab, I could only use the program which was on the screen. The panels weren’t working, though the shortcut keys were. Fortunately enough, I had assigned shortcut key to open the terminal and it was working, so I could even access the terminal.
Fortunately, firefox (shiretoko) was running as the frontmost application and I was able to access the internet. I searched for How to kill X and was presented with many solutions.
I tried killall X in terminal but it didn’t work. Suddenly, I remembered that X was called Xorg in jaunty. I did this:
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Well all OSes have bad programs, Linux has it too. Some times they stop responding and unlike windows, they don’t make the whole OS unresponsive. The application alone is unresponsive but you can still use other applications normally. Killing an unresponsive application is fairly easy job in Ubuntu.
Bring the unresponsive application to the front, the app must be having a desaturated look because its unresponsive (if its not, check again… it must not be unresponsive). Launch the terminal and type:
$ xkill
The mouse cursor will change to a cross, click anywhere on the unresponsive application and it will be killed.
To get things done faster, you can type xkill in “Run application” dialog box too. Press Alt+F2 to bring the run dialog box and type xkill and enter. The mouse cursor will change to cross and click on unresponsive app to kill it.
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