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Usually I'm asking myself this question when it's too late already and my XServer or xfce hung itself and I have to rely on tty1-tty6 to actually do something.

Is there any way to access my Tasks at tty7 from tty1-6? For example: An application is wasting all the resources and I can't do anything useful on my desktop. Yet I have access to tty1-6. What could I do?

Thank you

Qohelet
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What do you mean by access? You can kill processes on other TTYs.

If something locks X (on TTY7) I usually just log in on TTY1, run htop and kill whatever process is running rampage, before going back to TTY7.

Oli
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  • In my case I would like to restart xfce from tty1. http://askubuntu.com/questions/215632/restart-xfce-from-tty1 provides some kind of solution, yet I'm not satisfied with killing tasks. I'd prefer just to restart them – Qohelet Jan 02 '15 at 15:51
  • You can restart the desktop session (`sudo restart lightdm`) but that will kill all the old applications running on the old instance (unless they've forked out). It's often less disruptive to just take a quick peek at what's causing the problem and kill it on its own. – Oli Jan 02 '15 at 15:59
  • `sudo restart lightdm` won't work in tty1 if I remember right? Also killing all the applications is something I try to avoid. – Qohelet Jan 02 '15 at 16:19
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    It will work. And as I have said twice now, if you don't want to kill everything, find the problematic process (using top, htop, etc) and just kill that one process. – Oli Jan 02 '15 at 16:27
  • @Qohelet: Ubuntu is not Windows: killing a process is just that: killing a process. (Oh and don't forget to click the little grey check-mark below the number 3 which means that 3 other people read this answer and approved it to be a good answer) – Fabby Jan 03 '15 at 21:36