Extremely brief intro to managing in a shell

Emergency procedures: killing wild apps, etc

SSH, sessions, envars, other fun things

Some tips and tricks

Konsole is a terminal emulator for the X Window System. It is essentially based on the DEC's VT100 and many of its succesors. Konsole – also referred to as a shell – is an essential tool on Linux® and UNIX® based machines for fast and productive work.

Emergency Procedures:

On Linux® and UNIX®-based systems every process runs independently in its own memory space so it can't accidentally overwrite any other processes memory, unless of course it has root privileges. If a process in KDE crashes due to a bug one should not need to worry about it accessing any other active process.

To keep track of all system processes use the top command or ps in Konsole. Using these utilities will make it much easier to find and kill off rogue programs.

An example of using signals in Konsole, Konqueror has crashed leaving behind a running process of nspluginviewer which is taking up 12% of your memory and 10% of your cpu cycles. In top use the k command switch to kill the task. You will be prompted for the PID and then the signal to send to kill it. For more on info on what signals you can send to a running process see the full manual on signals (type man signal in a Konsole or go to #signal in Konqueror).

SSH, sessions, envars, other fun things.

If you are using Konsole for remote administration consider using Konsole's “Session” feature. To use this click on the menu entry Settings->Configure Konsole. From here choose the Sessions tab and fill in the name for your new session. This will now become your default session when you start Konsole.

When Konsole is invoked bash specific commands and KDE specific variables are read and executed from ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile. The preferred configuration file for user environments is ~/.bash_profile, the commands printenv or env can be used to display all currently set variables. To set a variable in the shell use VARNAME=value. For a full list of variables that can be set in KDE see the wiki .

Some tips and tricks

To rename Konsole's session use Ctrl+Alt+S and enter the new name.

If you find the need to run any KDE program with root privileges, you can use the KDE su command with the -c switch from the command line like this: kdesu -c -n PROGRAM, using the -n switch will prevent KDE from remembering your passwords.