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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