Linux

The invisible screensaver (kslideshow, import, screenshot)

I was trying to configure my screensaver such, that it would display as only picture the desktop at the moment when the screensaver became active. In the KDE control center I chose the Slideshow screensaver (under Banners and Pictures) and in the setup I chose a specific directory as the media diretory (/home/your_user_name/Documents/images/desktop/). I also selected display one random image only. The media directory should be empty. Then I renamed /opt/kde3/bin/kslideshow.kss executable to kslideshow_ori.kss and created a shell script in the same directory that I named kslideshow.kss.

Updating Suse Linux 9.0 to 9.1

The .0 to .1 update suggests, that it's not a big deal. In fact, it is. Many things do brake and most people advise to do a clean install of 9.1. Because of extensive third party installations and customization I wanted to upgrade. In case the upgrade appeared unusable, I wanted to have the possibility to go back to 9.0. This appeared easily possible because we had a free 8.6 GB partition (hdb3) on the harddisk. Actually it was not free, but it was the root partition of our RedHat 9 installation. I did the following things:

Kill and defunct (zombie) processes (kill, pstree, xkill)

Sometimes you cannot kill some processes via the regular command kill -9 PID When you list them with ps -aux you will see the entry defunct Those defunct processes are apparently still hanging around mostly because their parent application is waiting for them to receive something. These processes are already dead, that's why they are called "zombies". In order to kill them, you have to kill the parent application first. You can figure out what the parent's PID is by issuing pstree PID

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