kdeinit is used to start all other KDE programs. kdeinit can start normal binary program f iles as well as kdeinit loadable modules (KLMs). KLMs work just like binary program files but can be started more efficiently. KLMs live in $KDEDIR/lib/kde3

The drawback is that programs started this way appear as kdeinit in the output of top and ps. Use top -c or ps aux to see the actual program name:

% ps aux | grep bastian

bastian  26061  0.0  2.2 24284 11492 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: Running...
bastian  26064  0.0  2.2 24036 11524 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: dcopserver
bastian  26066  0.1  2.5 26056 12988 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: klauncher
bastian  26069  0.4  3.2 27356 16744 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kded
bastian  26161  0.2  2.7 25344 14096 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: ksmserver
bastian  26179  1.1  3.4 29716 17812 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kicker
bastian  26192  0.4  3.0 26776 15452 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: klipper
bastian  26195  1.0  3.5 29200 18368 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kdesktop

As you might have noticed, this has another side effect, making it difficult to kill a process that is causing trouble:

% killall kdesktop
kdesktop: no process killed

You might be tempted to try killall kdeinit, but killing all kdeinit processes will have the effect of shutting down all of KDE. In effect, total destruction!

There are two simple solutions to this:

% kdekillall kdesktop
or good old
% kill 26195

kdekillall is part of the KDE SDK package.