How-To: Kill Misbehaving Applications and Scripts (aka Processes) Under Linux
Ever have your PC freeze up and not know what to do? The following should get you out of a bind and back to normal without having to do a hard (and harmful) reboot.
Scenario #1: X Windows is still up and running but a certain application/script has frozen or is slowing down your PC.
A. [Basic] If you’re Linux distribution is using GNOME, Go to System > Administration > System Monitor and click on the Processes tab. Once there, look to see which process is hogging up your CPU resources, click on the culprit, and then click End Process. Hopefully that should be enough to get everything back to normal.
B. [Advanced] If you prefer to use the Terminal, type top at the command prompt. This will give you a dynamic view all your running processes via a command line interface. Again, look for the culprit hogging up the CPU resources and note the PID (aka Process ID) number. Next, type k and you will be prompted to enter the PID to kill. Type the number and see if the command kills the process. If yes, use Ctrl+c to exit top. If no, read on. MORE »
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Woohoo! GNOME Nautilus Has Received a Huge Speed Boost Improvement
I’m not quite sure when it happened (this morning or a couple days ago), but the Ubuntu team pushed out a new update to Gutsy 7.10/GNOME 2.20.1 that drastically increased the speed of Nautilus’ file seek functionality – a big bugaboo of mine. Here’s what I mean: Previously it took Nautilus a good 5-10 seconds on my 3Ghz PC with 1GB of RAM to display my listing of 1,400 images (and growing) every time I wanted to upload an image to my website or view contents from that particular folder. Well, guess what? It now takes one second (or a matter of milliseconds) for the upload listing and a second or two for the thumbnail view when first opening the folder.
I can’t even begin to tell you how pleased I am about this update, but I can say that my productivity is going to shoot through the roof because of it. Great work Nautilus developers!
Side note: I also noticed, when in list mode for uploads (as in the above pic), that one can now toggle on/off hidden files through the right-click menu (interesting), but one still can’t right-click or double-click a file to rename or delete it like in Windows.
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About
Alexander Grundner is a San Francisco Peninsula based web publisher who spends most of his time tracking down news stories for eHomeUprade, attending technology events, or working on his next big project.
For fun he likes to stay active outdoors, take photographs, shoot video, hack together PHP/Python code, play with Linux, and test new technologies.
