how do you stop a task.....

please try to post in whole sentences.... what shoudl ctrl+alt+del have to do with stopping individual programs? that will reboot the entire machine.

open a console, type "ps -A|less" (the | allows less to run, so the screen doesn't scroll by), find your process, issue "kill ####" (#'s are the process number listed next to it).

There are actually many ways to kill a process, depending on the type of process running. The two most common are "kill -9 ####" and "kill -15 ####", which are used to kill or terminate a program. "man kill" will help you with these and others.

Remember, you might have to be root to kill some processes, as they run as root or have root-owned elements that a normal user can't kill.

Don't tell MS that!

okay, i was trying to install lotus notes, my computer froze up so i am just trying to ctrl, alt del to kill the program...That's all.....

would be nice to know what distro you're using...
mandrake has a nice feature:
Menu>applications>monitoring>xkill
then, with the bullseye left click on the window (program) you want to kill.
Easy!

YOu can do that in RedHat too, only thing is, you have to run it from the terminal.

In Windows World the popular ctrl-alt-del has brough up a task list for a long time (at least Windows 98 and probably Windows 95).

In RH9 I bring up a monitor using System Tools -> System Monitor. You can use it to kill processes.

top also works well
top -u <username> will limit the display to the processes you launched as a user.

For a GUI tool, I really like qps http://freshmeat.net/projects/qps/