MEPIS Community Forum

I am basically a newbie to Linux and Mepis, but getting more comfortable with its performance. Today I started a spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc and using my mouse, picked a cell to format it and accidently closed the popup window with the options by clicking the mouse. This caused the program to no longer responde to my mouse and I could not close the spreadsheet. When I tried to Restart the system I go a message that the restart was cancelled by the LibreOffice Calc program. If I opened another spreadsheet, the mouse was still unresponsive. I eventually had to reboot the computer with the Reset button. I have not yet booted into Mepis, since I had some Win XP work to do, but will do so tomorrow and report back if there is any residual problems. Does anyone know HOW to cancel a hung program, particularly LibreOffice?

Under the File menu is a choice to Exit. If that doesn't respond use Ctrl+Alt+Esc then with the pointer within the LO window left-click. That will kill the program.

Another way is to open a Konsole/Terminal. Then type pkill programname and hit Enter.

for times when things really go sideways and you can't open a konsole try, ALT+F2 will bring up a "run" dialog box - for me, it's usually at the top of the screen...

then, as lucky suggested, you can run pkill... for safety sake, i wouldn't use pkill as root because it's capable of killing ANY process that matches the program name. so, for instance, if you ran pkill office it would kill anything AND everything with office in it. whereas, if you ran pkill as yourself it would still do this, but you wouldn't be able to kill processes that aren't being run under your user privs...

Thanks both of you. I will try to reproduce the hangup and then see if these solutions work. I will report back with results.

do a search for libreoffice.. there's another thread involving LO and firefox that sounds like it may be a similar issue to yours.