Help with gnome panel freezing

Text Motif · Post by **Text Motif** » Sat Jun 11, 2011 2:06 am

Hi, I've posted this on Ubuntu forums as well, but I'd like this communities input. Has anyone experienced this before? Note that DW8 is the only Windows program I use...

Help with gnome panel freezing
Ubuntu 10.04
Kernel 2.6.32-32-generic
Dell D620

I really have searched for a solution, but none of them matched mine.

This is the problem:
At least once a day my desktop freezes. I can see everything, and the mouse moves. The mouse even does hover states over icons, but no clicking. Clicking won't do anything. The interaction between the mouse and X just stops. I have to switch to the keyboard, and ultimately press control>alt>backspace, logging back in again to get the mouse working. (It's a usb mouse: nothing special.)

This is a drag, because I have to use the keyboard to cycle through all open programs to save all the open files before dumping the interface to log back in again.

I thought at first that this might be a Wine issue because I've noticed that it usually happens when Dreamweaver 8 is running. However, Dreamweaver is always running because I'm always working with it. So it is not unusual for DW, along with Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice, and some other programs, to be running at the same time.

I can't take that much time off this production machine to do an elimination process in hopes of weeding out the problem.

I'm not sure where to begin? Can someone help me out?

Thanks.

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Sat Jun 11, 2011 5:25 am

On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 02:06 -0500, Text Motif wrote:

At least once a day my desktop freezes. I can see everything, and the
mouse moves. The mouse even does hover states over icons, but no
clicking. Clicking won't do anything. The interaction between the
mouse and X just stops. I have to switch to the keyboard, and
ultimately press control>alt>backspace, logging back in again to get
the mouse working. (It's a usb mouse: nothing special.)

This may not help, but....

Sometime back I had a similar problem with a Fedora installation - most
likely F8 or F10, so a while ago. The PC in question is quite old, so
has an optical mouse connected via a mini-DIN (PS/2) plug, and runs
24/7. Sometimes I'd try to login via its screen & keyboard. The mouse
would have no effect - pointer wouldn't move, clicking did nothing,but
moving it did cause its LED's brightness to change.

Unplugging the mouse and plugging it in again made it immediately
responsive.

This is a drag, because I have to use the keyboard to cycle through
all open programs to save all the open files before dumping the
interface to log back in again.

Try my trick - unplug and reconnect the mouse. Its not a real solution
to the problem, but if it works it will at least avoid logging out.

If you can work out how to reliably cause the problem, raise a bug
report with Ubuntu.

Martin