This is going to be my first tutorial, I hope you like it. In this tutorial I will explain how you get a ‘task manager’ in Ubuntu. Please leave a message if something is missing or something is not clear.

If you are a windows user and you switched to Ubuntu, the first thing you probably are looking for is the task manager. In windows you can press the famous keyboard combo ‘Ctrl+Alt+Delete’ to get your task manager. However this does not seems to work in Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu you have a similar tool as the task manager, it is called ‘System monitor‘.
In this tutorial I will show you how to make a shortcut for system monitor in Ubuntu. This tutorial is written for Ubuntu version 9.04 with GNOME as desktop.

1] First go to ‘System‘ and then to ‘Preferences‘, finally click on ‘Keyboard Shortcuts‘. If it’s not clear see figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Creating shortcut for system monitor, step 1

2] Then you get the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts‘ screen, see figure 2. Click on ‘+ Add‘.

Figure 2: Creating shortcut for system monitor, step 2

3] Now a screen will popup where you have to fill in a name and a command, see figure 3. You can choose an arbitrary name as long it does not already exist. In this case we choose ‘System monitor‘. For command use the following: ‘gnome-system-monitor’. Click on ‘Apply’ when you are done.

Figure 3: Creating shortcut for system monitor, step 3

4] If you scroll down you find ‘Custom Shortcuts‘, see figure 4. Now click on the field with the text ‘Disabled’ which is next to ‘System monitor‘. To create a key combination for it just press your keys. In this case ‘Ctrl+Shift+Esc’ was chosen since ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’ was already used.

Figure 4: Creating shortcut for system monitor, step 4

5] If everything went ok, then you should have something similar like figure 5. You can close the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts‘ window and test you new keyboard shortcut.

Figure 5: Creating shortcut for system monitor, step 5