xkill does not work from LXDE panel [Solved-Mostly]

[vger7]

princethrash:

It's a low spec machine,
Pentium 4 CPU 2.00GHz, 768m ram

But hey, thanks for trying!
I really appreciate the effort. 

Old-Polack:

Ctrl+Alt+Esc does not work, does nothing in this DE.
Maybe keymapping could make that happen, but
I don't know how in LXDE.

[Neal ManBear]

vger7,    
You have xkill in the systray. Application launchbar is at the other end of the panel. Icons for PCManFM, PCC, Synaptic, LXTerminal and Firefox are loaded on it by default.    

As I said previously, use lxtask. Add it to application launchbar. Open it, find the line for firefox (or whatever), right click that line and choose to stop or to kill. It is easy to use lxtask to kill a task/process.     

[JohnW_57]

Vger7,  did you try to find the cause why the browser is misbehave with the flash-plugin?
Did you try a another browser?
Is hardware acceleration enabled in the browser?
Gives the video driver the issue?
Or a another package conflict?

There a lot of posts on the forum about browsers/flash-plugin

JohnW

[vger7]

Neal,
Moving xkill to the other side where the other icons are makes not difference.
It is setup to be an application launcher.

As far as adding lxtask, this would work fine... for me.
Unfortunately, this is my grandsons machine.
He is autistic with a language disability.
Communications with him is quite an effort.
Maybe in time this would work, but if I installed it now, and
showed him how to use it, I'm afraid he would just click on many
things and get himself more frustrated. (he flips chairs and such
when this happens).
So for now, this is not an option for him to use.

But thanks for the suggestion. 

JohnW,
Some site are just heavier than others.
Problem is with both Firefox and Chrome.
At present, he prefers Chrome.
Hardware accel is enabled in Firefox... can't find setting in Chrome.
Machine has no other video issues at all.
No package conflicts either.

Maybe just too much for this machine.
Yeah, flash just sucks on some site.

[JohnW_57]

I suggest disable the hardware acceleration in Firefox and see if it helps.

JohnW

[princethrash]

Out of curiosity, how much RAM is used on a fresh boot? You can check this with lxtask.
Lightweight browsers are nightmares, but Opera is an option for stability, and Midori is an option for very lightweightness.

Another option is to make a simple icon that ONLY kills Chrome, forgetting about xkill entirely, if that's all you need it for anyway.  A single click will kill chrome this way, just using the regular killall command.

I believe this python program should create a task icon and all:

Code: [Select]

import gtk, os

class KillChrome(gtk.StatusIcon):
    def __init__(self):
        super(KillChrome, self).__init__()
        self.set_from_file("/path/to/icon/picture.png")
        self.connect('activate', self.when_clicked)
    
    def when_clicked(self, widget):
        os.system("killall chrome")

KillChrome()
gtk.main()

You would save this as whatever.py, and then run it with python2, like this:

Code: [Select]

python2 whatever.py

But I would try to solve the problem more permanently with lighter weight stuff, system tweaks, or get the OS so lean that loading Chrome won't matter.  Chrome is great, but it's a total hog.

[Neal ManBear]

Neal,
Moving xkill to the other side where the other icons are makes not difference.
It is setup to be an application launcher.

     
You misunderstood me. I did not suggest that you move it.     
You had said that it was in the application launchbar, but it was in systray. I told you that as a point of information. The systray and the application launchbar are two different things. Accurately naming the place an icon/app appears on your panel can make a difference in how someone researches a way to help.     

[vger7]

Sorry guys,
I can't respond properly or check things at the moment.
I'll get back to you when I'm allowed to re-access the machine. 
I've been hogging it up for a while and someone is very displeased.

[vger7]

Sorry guys,
     I realize that I started this thread last Sunday and haven't gotten back
to you. But I learned Sunday evening that my sister had just been
diagnosed with stage4 ovarian cancer.
Needless to say, solving this problem was put on the backburner.

I have had time to mess with this issue today and made some progress.

As I also have Pclos LXDE on a laptop I tried it there, with some different results.
First I changes the xkill.destop file to say Terminal=true, instead of false, so I
could hopefully see some action.
Clicking on the new panel icon on the laptop causes a terminal to appear very
briefly, a fraction of a second, then disappear.
However, if I clicked very rapidly, (a very short hold duration), the terminal stays
up and everything works as it should.
I cannot replicate this action on the desktop computer with the mouse, it only
works on the laptop touchpad. A timing issue? weird.

Anyway, after doing some digging, I've found that using the keystroke combination
of Alt-F4, accomplishes the desired results on both machines.

So even though the original issue of 'xkill not working from the panel' is somewhat
solved depending on the hardware, I have a workable solution for both machines.
I'll mark this thread as 'solved-mostly'. It may be helpful to someone else down the road.

Thanks to all who tried to help.

[BJF]

Wishing your sister well.

[Neal ManBear]

Wishing your sister well.

     
+1!!!!!     

[vger7]

Thanx guys.