Tuesday, February 3, 2009

ready to kill some processes/applications in linux?

In Linux -as in all modern Operating Systems-, applications become unresponsive and you may want to kill the process pertaining to them. To do this, open the terminal and write this:

killall applicationName

If that does not work try

killall -9 applicationName

If you don't have an idea about the application name, you can take look at the current processes by writing

ps

then to kill the processes you want

kill processID

If that does not work then try

kill -9 processID

Another possibility is to use xkill (for applications with gui). The window of the application waiting to be killed should be visible. Then, open Terminal and type

 xkill 
and later choose the window of the application to be killed.

Monday, February 2, 2009

better touchpad performance in linux mint

After some time with Linux Mint I realized that I'm not fully satisfied with the behavior of my touchpad and thought about downloading a program which will allow me to tweak it. I downloaded gsynaptics thru synaptic package manager and edited xorg.conf for gsynaptics to work. First you should open xorg.conf with a text editor. There's a text editor called Mousepad that's bundled to Linux Mint. So all you have to do is to open Terminal. Then write "sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and press enter. Then find the section below:


Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"


Add the line
Option     "SHMConfig"     "true"
as the last entry (just before EndSection). Save the conf file and reboot. Later, open the Terminal and write "gsynaptics" and configure your touchpad. Voila!