Stopping X

If you have followed our suggestion to go pointing and clicking, you may well have a confused X and so need to terminate X. As with most things in X, a universal and simple method does not exist, so you need experiment:   

• Close all edit sessions and quit programs before stopping X. Use the Unix commands ps -ef or ps aux to see if your processes are still running, and if so, kill them.
• Look for a window labeled something like Exit Here or login. Move the mouse into this window, enter the Unix command exit or logout; this may shut down X.
• You may have a pull-down menu item for Shut Down, Quit, Reboot, or Restart. Click on the gray background to pop up the menu; these may terminate your X session, possibly after asking you for a confirmation of your desires.
• An effective, if somewhat inelegant, method for stopping X on some systems is to simultaneously depress the Ctrl, Alt, and Backspace keys. You then will be told that the X server has crashed-as if this is the beginning rather than the end of your problem; don't worry, this is your intention.

The difficulty in terminating the X Windows System is that in addition to the window manager and X itself, virtually every item you see on a screen, such as Figure 4.1, is a separate, active program. To shut down X properly, you must kill all of these programs and terminate them in the proper order. If you do not, you run the risk of Unix becoming very stern with you and not letting you log off until you do something about your stopped jobs.