Frozen or Misbehaving Programs and Unresponsive Desktops

Sometimes Linux programs will freeze or start to behave strangely. When this happens users can kill the program. Kill is a term that means to stop the program from running. 

In KDE, a program called the KDE System Guard (K Menu->System-> KDE System Guard) can be used to bring up a list of programs (processes) running on the system. Users should be able to associate the program they want to kill with a name in the process list.

In KDE, users can bring up a skull and cross bone pointer by using the [Alt] and [Esc] keys together. When a user clicks on a program or item it will be sent a kill command.  

Sometimes a program might take over the whole screen, and users will be unable to use conventional methods for closing. When this happens, hold down the [Alt]key and drag the window in order to view the appropriate button.

On the odd occasion, entire Linux desktops freeze or become unusable. When this happens, users can use the keyboard short cut combination [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Backspace] to reset the desktop.