Wednesday, June 24, 2015

How to easily kill slow or unresponsive programs and windows

(this tutorial originally appeared on the Peppermint forum, it id by mattosensei)

Have you ever been faced with a laggy, unresponsive or crashed application and program window?

It happens - though for me, much less in Linux than in Windows.

Sometimes you can't X out to close the program but you do want to close it down.

There is a very quick and easy terminal command you can use to 'point and kill' the unresponsive program. Simply open up a terminal window using CTRL+ALT+T and then type the code below and hit enter:

xkill

You will then see a X-hair appear. Just hover it over the window that's not responding and click the mouse button. Voila - the process/window/application will be killed.

Note: don't try to kill by clicking in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen as you will inadvertently kill Nemo (the desktop manager running your user interface  ;))

Anyway, a handy little tool in case you're not aware of it. 8)

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

My "new" rig

It's been a long time since my last post here, sorry for that. A few things lead to this, mainly my problems in dual booting Windows 8.1 with Peppermint 6 and also because I donated my trusty Lenovo S10e netbook to my mother.

So I was stuck without Linux...

Two months in, my Lenovo i3 laptop started to slow down - as Windows 8.1 is horrible. I started longing back to the days when I had a fast computer.

Yesterday I found someone trying to throw away a computer, it had an interesting case and I asked him if he would mind if I "salvaged" it. He said, "be my guest" Turns out it is a pretty sweet computer:

It has an antec case!

For a list of specs:

Mobo:
Foxconn
CPU: Dual core Pentium CPU E5300 2.6 GHZ
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics Card:
AMD RV730 PRO [Radeon HD 4650]

I still can't believe he was throwing this away.

So here is a screenshot, I've installed Conky, but have not changed the default wallpaper (Peppermint 6 is out, I need to do a review at some point).

Linux truly is amazing at repurposing hardware that would have been considered obsolete.

Long live Peppermint Linux!