the value of xkill

By basd on Sep 9, 2010 | In linux, gnome, lxde, jolicloud

KDE3 used to have a hotkey to pop up a little skull and crossbones cursor, which -- if you clicked on a stalled or runaway application (well, any application), would kill it. Very useful -- especially when there was a much bigger problem with runaway applications. (In fact, there was another app. which was tray resident that would catch and offer to kill runaway applications.)

...

I'm uncertain whether these apps made it to KDE4...BUT -- I just remembered "xkill" which does the same thing as the skull&crossbones cursor, if less picturesquely. Run xkill from <alt><F2> run prompt and the cursor becomes an "x" that will kill whatever window you click on.

So ... if we want to kill lxde panels or conky so we can restart them, xkill works a lot better than calling up the system monitor and chasing down the app.

Added Bonus: Well, I don't know that xkill will do much for the stalled Jolicloud problem. My Jolicloud desktop -- the portion with all the big icons, etc. on it -- keeps stalling out. This may well be the result of my many customizations, don't know. We get an option to "Kill" or "Wait".

Neither option works very well. "Wait" doesn't recover the desktop and "Kill" doesn't either. If you are running a bunch of lxde panels, as I am, it doesn't make much difference because you still have access to your system.

But ... if you are running only Jolicloud, then you have issues (though you still have access via the <alt><F2> run command.

There is a way, however, to get the desktop back and running. Bring up the system monitor (or, say "lxtask" if you have LXDE installed) and use it to kill all the instances of "nickel browser".)

As soon as you have killed it, Jolicloud will reboot the nickel browser (which is actually Chromium) desktop.

Maybe "xkill" will work as well, since when it crashes, the Jolicloud Desktop still offers a desktop "page" that offers a link to Help. (Unfortunately, the link just restarts the Kill/Wait/Not Working cycle.) So ... maybe we can xkill the nickel browser by clicking on this. But, I haven't tried it so I don't know what will actually happen. The next time I get a crash I'll see what happens and if I remember, I'll update this post.