I was wondering if there was an equivilent soft reboot built into Linux, or if there was a task manager that would work if things started to go pear shaped?

I ask this, as I don't like to hit the reset button if I can still move my mouse around!!

I am running KDE on Red Hat 9.

Thanks

Agile

ctrl+alt+backspace will boot you out of X, and then you can use ctrl+alt+delete if you have to, or just reboot command, or shutdown -r now. don't know if ctrl+alt+delete will reboot from kde/gnome -- unlike with windows, i never had to try it.

Why do you want to do this? Are things going pear-shaped? Do you have a real reason to want to force your system to reboot? I'm curious...

On occasion my screen-saver has crashed (Euphoria GL enhanced, and now i cannot change the options on it) Although all other savers are fine, this one is causing problems, although it was working fine.

I have also had open office freeze up on me whilst it was trying to install, but the second time round it was fine. That first time though it froze up and did not budge from about 85%. The mouse still moved, but the rest of Linux went smashing down.

I think it is just my system, I have an ability to crash anything!! That is why I have learnt so much about windows

Agile

If apps freeze but you still have the mouse and can open a console window you can kill the offending app by:

killall <process_name>
or
kill <pid>

The command
ps ax

will list all running processes and their pids.

ctrl-alt-del is usually configured to reboot the PC (via the shutdown command) and is configured in the /etc/inittab file.

If you can't get an X terminal do
CTRL+ALT+F1
you can then login to a command-line terminal and kill X or an offending app.
If you need to get back to X
CTRL+ALT+F7