[lug] Help with window manager "lockups"

[Hugh Brown]

Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> I need some help trying to figure out how to get around a problem with
> my desktop.  This one just has me stumped.
> 
> I wrote about this previously and mistakenly blamed Metacity (though
> metacity's reaction to the problem was still bad and was enough to make
> me switch to XFce on this machine).  I'm having a window manager
> "lockup" that prevents any mouse clicks or autoraise/autofocus from
> being honored and keyboard input from allowing me to move between
> desktop workspaces.  The problem is intermittent:  happens at what
> appears to be random times though lately it seems to happen when I
> change workspaces to where Evolution and Firefox are running side by
> side in a single workspace spanning dual monitors. I have no idea if
> these apps are affecting the problem or not.
> 
> The problem happens on just one machine running F9.  That machine has an
> NVidia card and is using the NVidia driver (not the open source driver).
> Other machines running F9 using other video drivers have not had the
> problem.  I've upgraded the NVidia driver to the latest driver with no
> impact on the problem.
> 
> The desktop is still running - I can pop up windows from other clients
> but can't give them focus.  The window with focus does not accept
> keyboard input.  I can kill the X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.  The
> problem occurs with GNOME (metacity), XFce (xfwm4) and KDE (kdewm).
> It's always the exact same symptoms:  no focus change, no keyboard input
> except for killing the server.  Panel apps like the clock and system
> monitors (with graphs) continue to run.  The mouse also moves freely
> around the displayed windows.  There is nothing in the X or system logs
> showing any problem has occurred.
> 
> Considering the exact same problem occurs with three different window
> managers I don't think its desktop or wm related.  It might be the
> USB-based wireless keyboard/mouse I use (Logitech S510) but I'd expect
> the mouse to stop working completely or the keyboard to not be able to
> send the server kill sequence.    It could be the memory in the system
> is dying but I'd expect random errors in that case - not the exact same
> error each time.
> 
> I'm thinking it might be USB ports on this Dell.  I've seen errors in
> the system logs from the USB subsystem in the past on this box.  I
> suppose a USB hickup left the window manager in a state it can't get out
> of, though to have three different window managers hit the same state
> seems odd.  There must be a common library at fault here (not recovering
> from the USB fault).  I just don't know which one.  And I'm not even
> sure if the USB is to blame here.  I'm just running out of other ideas.
> 
> I really hate having to kill the server every time this happens,
> especially since it's happening about once a day now.  Fortunately
> Firefox, Evolution and vi recover from these crashes rather well.  My
> next guess is to replace the wireless keyboard/mouse, but the
> replacement will *also* be USB so I'm not sure that's going to help any.
> There are no PS/2 connections on this box.
> 
> Anyone have any other suggestions?


I had this problem when I put a 160g IDE disk in an older box.  It would 
randomly crash, sometimes I could restart X, sometimes I couldn't.  I 
took the disk out and all was fine.  I ran all the vendor diagnostics on 
the disk and they turned out fine.

I also ran into a problem where the .Xauthority file was getting locked 
and I couldn't open new windows until I ran stat ~/.Xauthority  If I had 
a shell open, I was in luck, otherwise it was log into a different 
machine and do the dance that way.  Of course my home dir was on nfs in 
that instance.

Hugh