Chapter 14. Useful tips

14.1. Reading documentation in TDE
14.2. Move or resize windows quickly
14.3. Killing windows in TDE
14.4. What if something is so wrong that I can't even get the skull & crossbones cursor? How do I get out of a total lockup?
14.1.

Reading documentation in TDE

Pop up the Run Command window (Alt+F2 by default) and type:

  • man:command for man pages. It even unpacks on the fly if the man pages are gzipped.

  • info:command for info pages.

  • help:kdeappname for TDE application help pages.

You can enter any of these in the Location text box in Konqueror.

Uou can use the TDE Help Center. Start the TDE Help Center by selecting Help from the TDE menu. Once the TDE Help Center has loaded, the window on the left will contain an entry called Unix manual pages. Select that entry to browse through all the installed manual pages on your system.

14.2.

Move or resize windows quickly

To move a window, use Alt+left mouse button. Alt+right mouse button will resize the window. Last but not least, Alt+middle mouse button raises/lowers the window. The TDE Control Center allows you to change these mouse bindings. Please refer to "Windows, How To Work Them" in the Trinity user guide for more information.

14.3.

Killing windows in TDE

There is a standard keybinding (Ctrl+Alt+Esc) that changes the mouse pointer to a skull & crossbones cursor. Click that cursor on a window to kill it. The keybindings are viewable/changeable from the TDE Control Center.

Caution

Using this option kills the program forcibly. Data might be lost, and some processes related to the program might remain active. Use only as a last resort.

14.4.

What if something is so wrong that I can't even get the skull & crossbones cursor? How do I get out of a total lockup?

These kind of locks tend to occur when an application locks up while it has a so called mouse/keyboard grab. When that happens you can try to select a virtual text console with Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login. With the following command you will get a list of all running processes:

        ps -aux | more

By killing the process that has the mousegrab, your desktop will come to life again. Unfortunately you can't see which process that is, so you will have to find out through trial and error. To kill a process use:

        kill -9 pid

Here pid is the process id of the process, which is the first number on each line reported by ps -aux.

You can switch back to the desktop with Ctrl+Alt+F7 (or F8 through F9 depending on your operating system) to see if things work again. When you press Alt+Tab you should get a response from the window manager. If not, you need to get back to the text console and try to kill another process.