so, is there an equivalent to the windows ctrl.alt.del for mandrake or any other linux? Right now my realplayer is stuck and I am going to reboot to unstick it. Last night my system froze, so I may as well ask if anyone knows why a system would do this after functioning flawlessly for a few months. Does Linux generate temp or other files that bog the system down and should be removed occasionally? Are there certain routines that I should enable to clean the system or system logs? Right now I never allow the system to stay up for more than 12-15 hours at a time so are there auto routines that I am not letting run? Thanks.

I'm not sure if there's a gui one but I bet there is, but the most common way to kill a process is to type "ps -aux" in the console. You then can find the process number of the program you want to kill and type "kill xxxx" (xxxx being any given process id). There's also "killall nameoftheappyoukill" which will kill all the process of a given program.

ctrl-alt-backspace terminates all X processes and either shuts X down (if runlevel 3) or restarts X (if runlevel 5).

cntrl-alt-esc

This will change your mouse pointer, whatever you click on gets killed.


another one is:

in a terminal type:

top

find the PID number and hit the "k" button then type the number then press enter. to get out of it hit cnrtl-z