04 February 2012

How To Add A Force Quit Icon To The Unity Launcher - Ubuntu 11.10/12.04



In this tutorial we will see how to add a "Force Quit" icon to the Unity launcher of Ubuntu 11.10/12.04 that allows to force kill any unresponsive application or window. After clicking this icon in your launcher, click any window to force close it. To make the installation simple, I have created the .desktop file and uploaded it to my Dropbox account.



Getting Started

Open the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the following commands to download and add the "Force Quit" .desktop file to your system:

wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47950494/Force_Quit.desktop
mv Force_Quit.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

Now you have two options for adding the "Force Quit" icon to the Unity launcher:

  • Option 1
Via the terminal, run this command:

nautilus ~/.local/share/applications/

Then Drag and drop the Force_Quit.desktop file into the launcher:


  • Option 2
Search the Unity Dash for "force quit" and drag and drop  Force_Quit.desktop in the Unity launcher:


You can now use this button to force kill any unresponsive window.

That's it!