Hello,

Sometimes, I'll only have a browser up and running nothing else, and Conky says my CPU is at 100%, and there seem to be other"hidden" processes running, toggling between 2 and 3 and sometimes 4. Usually, when I'm in my browser and listening to a radio show, it stays down around 2 to 8 % with 1 or 2 process running.

How do i find out what other processes are running? In other words, how do i tell if some malicious software, malware, or adware might be taking over my system? Is this a problem, like in Windows? Everybody says that as long as you are not in ROOT mode, then you are safe. And I'm never in ROOT mode.

But how do I uncover mysterious processes and how do I tell if they're from me, the user, and not from somebody else, via something trojan-horsed in from the Internet?

By the way, the 100% goes away when I reboot. Maybe it's just something I started. But how do I know? How do I get"under the hood," in other words?

Thanks

In the menu there is an option called top or htop. This lists the processes being used. If one gets to 100%, then you may need to kill it rather than reboot.

Screenshots'r'us:




typical output of htop, 9th column from the left shows CPU usage. You can kill processes by highlighting them (navigate with cursor keys) and pressing F9+Enter.

Note: Root processes require root privileges, so su root before you attempt killing them.