kdeinit is used to start all other KDE programs. kdeinit can start normal binary program f iles as well as kdeinit loadable modules (KLMs). KLMs work just like binary program files but can be started more efficiently. KLMs live in $ KDEDIR /lib/kde3

The drawback is that programs started this way appear as kdeinit in the output of top and ps . Use top -c or ps aux to see the actual program name:

% 



ps aux | grep bastian





bastian  26061  0.0  2.2 24284 11492 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: Running...
bastian  26064  0.0  2.2 24036 11524 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: dcopserver
bastian  26066  0.1  2.5 26056 12988 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: klauncher
bastian  26069  0.4  3.2 27356 16744 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kded
bastian  26161  0.2  2.7 25344 14096 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: ksmserver
bastian  26179  1.1  3.4 29716 17812 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kicker
bastian  26192  0.4  3.0 26776 15452 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: klipper
bastian  26195  1.0  3.5 29200 18368 ?       S    21:27   0:00 kdeinit: kdesktop

As you might have noticed, this has another side effect, making it difficult to kill a process that is causing trouble:

% 



killall kdesktop




kdesktop: no process killed

You might be tempted to try killall kdeinit , but killing all kdeinit processes will have the effect of shutting down all of KDE. In effect, total destruction!

There are two simple solutions to this:

% 



kdekillall kdesktop




or good old
% 



kill 26195

kdekillall is part of the KDE SDK package.