couple of newbie questions...
 

i wanted to get linux for a while, so i downloaded knoppix to see what it was like, it doesn't seem too dissimilar to windows (i was expecting to see something like my old amiga desktop :D )

now, i have a couple of questions, is there a linux equivelent of notepad? and second, when i tried to exit the chromium game that came with knoppix, it froze, and i couldn't close it, so i'm just wondering is there a linux equivelent of ctrl-alt-delete?

Welcome to Linux and LinuxQuestions!

Knoppix comes with KDE as default desktop environment and it's very similar in appearance to Windows (a severe design problem if you ask me ;)). There are tons and tons of window managers and desktop environments that are more or less similar to Windows - most fall in the "less" category.

Notepad, eh? Pick your poison. kedit and kate are KDE apps, I use gvim (which cannot be compared to the lowly Notepad program since it's really a full blown development environment), there is gedit (from the Gnome desktop) and tons more.

Killing processes in Linux is not quite as easy as in Windows. But on the other hand - in Linux processes you want killed really die if you want them to! :)
Open up an xshell. I think you will find a shell icon on your desktop or in the panel at the bottom of your screen. Here's where the real magic happens. :)
Type killall processname to kill all instances of a process. You can find out the name of the running processes by typing ps -e (and it's going to be a whole lot of processes). If a process is particularily stubborn you can type kill -9 process_id to forcefully kill it in an instance. process_id is the number before the name of the process in the ps -e listing. You can also use top to see what process use a lot of CPU and RAM.

There are a few graphical tools for this kind of stuff but I don't use them. You might have something called ktop on Knoppix though. It's the KDE equivalent of the Task Manager in Windows.


Håkan

kdesysguard is the equivalent of ctrl+alt+del, but it isn't on the knoppix CD. You will have to install to the hard drive and install kdesysguard to get it to work. Most versions of linux includ kdesysguard with KDE though. To use it, you type ctrl+esc and that opens a window with a list of running programs. Select the one you want by clicking on it then kill it. In Knoppix, as mentioned above, you have to type "killall processname" in a console.