KDE-Forum.org

Generally speaking what can you do when stuff goes wrong in Linux? Can anyone offer some suggestions for more efficiently dealing with problems than what I have listed below? Any dumb ass friendly websites on the subject?

Eg. after exiting a game the mouse freezes on KDE desktop. Machine is alive and well (even responding to left mouse clicks, but cursor will not move).

My bag of tricks learnt in the last few days includes:

1. CTRL + ALT + ESC (gives skull to terminate applications)
2. Alt + F1 (brings up the "start" menu at cursor location if it can't be accessed from the usual bottom corner of the screen)
3. CTRL + Alt + F1 (gives a login prompt from which you can kill processes as per the KDE dopcumentation, ie. ps -aux | more to see the processes then kill -9 processidnumber to start killing the offending process/es --- a CTRL + Alt + F7 (say) takes you back to your original desktop to see whether you have fixed things)

This last method (3) seems hit and miss. Usually taking out the offending process (say the pid corresponding to a game which you think caused a problem) does not fix things and I am then just about randomly killing stuff in the hope it will help. A reboot is usually quicker and more effective.

Thanks in advance

Stu


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