linux

An out-of-memory (OOM) killer is a mechanism of the Linux kernel that is supposed to terminate (kill) high memory consuming processes if a system is critically low on memory.

Unfortunately, the OOM killer doesn’t always work properly.

It often starts too late, when the system is already out of memory, so it doesn’t have enough memory for itself, that leads to the frozen system.

This note shows how to call the OOM killer earlier, before the system gets into an unresponsive state. (more…)

While working on a Linux systems like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc., through a graphical user interface (GUI) it may happen that some application will hang the GUI and freeze a system.

To unfreeze the system without rebooting a machine we can restart an X server (also known as X11, or just X) that is the default GUI environment on most Linux distributions.

This note shows how to restart the X server from a command line and unfreeze the system. (more…)

When a laptop lid is getting closed, different scenarios are possible: do nothing, blank screen, suspend or shutdown.

In Linux Mint, the system behavior on closing the lid is controlled by the “Power Management” and “Screensaver” settings.

This note shows how to enable or disable screen locking when closing the lid in Linux Mint. (more…)

The Linux find command can be used for searching files and directories and performing subsequent operations on them.

If you use the find command to recursively search for some files and then pipe the result to the grep command, by doing this you will actually parse the file paths/names but not their contents.

This short note shows how to recursively find files by name and grep their contents for some word or pattern. (more…)

In Windows, there is a keyboard shortcut ⊞ Win + D used to minimize all the currently open windows and show the desktop.

To hide all windows and show the desktop in MATE edition of the Linux Mint there is a Ctrl + Alt + D shortcut. (more…)