Ever have a program in X go wrong and blank your screen? This handy Linux tip should help.
The other night I was trying to get some fan-sub anime to play on my Linux box but it was encoded in xvid and I did not feel like taking the time to check which player was setup to play xvid avi files.
Instead I used trial and error to play the file through each of the media player programs I had installed.
Then, while running VLC I tried to go full screen and everything went wrong.
My screen went blank but the audio was fine. Nothing I could think of was working to get me a menu.
I took a deep breadth and thought about it.
In Windows you would hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the proccess manager screen and try to kill a run-away application that way, but what about Linux?
So I hit Alt-F2 to bring up a new terminal and logged in as myself. I then ran "top" to see what was running on my system. There it was, "xvlc," the guilty party!
With top running you need only hit "k" and enter in the proccess ID to kill it.
I killed it and hit "Alt-F7" to return to my x-windows.
There you have it.
If you get stuck with a run-away proccess you need only open up a terminal and run "top," then use "k" to kill it!
I hope this helps!
