Where's the “task manager”?

Question

I'm looking for that thing that shows running processes, lets me affect them by clicking on them and maybe shows some nice charts like CPU usage, that kind of thing.

Answer 1

In Unity you can access the System Monitor by clicking on the power applet (on the top right of the screen) and clicking on "System Settings" or by simply searching for "System Monitor" in the Unity Menu:

Answer 2

The "task manager" for Ubuntu is called Gnome System Monitor and you can find it under System → Administration → System Monitor. To have it appear using the keyboard you can set a shortcut like this:

1. Open System → Preferences → Keyboard Shortcuts
2. Click "Add"
3. Type "System Monitor" in the "Name" box
4. Put "gnome-system-monitor" in the "Command" box
5. Click "Apply"
6. Click where it says "Disabled" in the same row as "System Monitor"
7. Hit Ctrl+Escape
8. Close the Keyboard Shortcuts window

You're set. Now when you press Ctrl+Escape the System Monitor will appear.

Answer 3

If you want to have a nifty set of bar graphs showing what your system is up to, you can

1. Right click on the panel (away from existing items)
2. Select Add to Panel
3. Select the System Monitor applet

You should find a bar graph on your panel showing the system load. If you right click on it, you can add more displays (network usage, memory use, io).

Answer 4

For the command line option.

Open a terminal and type:

top

You'll get a pretty simple listing of the processes using the most CPU time.

For a more interactive version that includes more features such as total CPU, memory, swap usage; and the ability to scroll through all of the running processes, install htop.

sudo apt-get install htop

Then in the terminal type:

htop

Note: htop shows a much more detailed breakdown of the processes running on your system.