How to diagnose a hanging desktop?

[private_lock]

Hello Forum!

I'm currently using Quantal Quetzal with KDE 4.9.4, Compiz-effects enabled, on a 4 year old Samsung R40 notebook with ATI onboard graphics. In addition to the integrated touchpad I regularly attach an external USB-mouse. Most often this setup works quite well for the leisure-time internet-surfing. So most often, there is a Firefox with quite an arsenal of addons running. In the background I automatically have Amarok, KMail, Pidin, Knotes, KGPG, TV-Browser.

There are two distinct situations, I want to diagnose:

1. The internal touchpad and the keyboard stop working. I can still operate the external mouse. I can even enter basic text via the screen-keyboard into a console. How can I find out what happened to the internal input devices. Is there any way, to bring them back online?

2. The whole desktop freezes, not accepting any input anymore, cannot ctrl-alt-f1 to virtual console, ctrl-alt-del ignored, softpower-off no effect, the onscreen clock does not update anymore. So far I found it independent of prior hibernation (may also happen a few minutes after boot up), seems not to depend on time or high processor demand. I also thought the notebook might get too warm, so I placed it outside in the winter-air for the night. Next morning, I found the clock-screensaver frozen at some time in the middle of the night. But most often it hangs in the middle of a mouse-drag-operation.

Frequency ranges from 3 times a day to once a week. Both problems already bother me for years. With every update I hoped, it might go away, but it never did.

Is there any logging I can enable, install debug packages? Any config files I should upload for you to diagnose?

So far the closest thing was this wiki-entry: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash
Only I never see an apport-retrace question ... so not helpful to me ...

[james147]

#2 sounds like a kernel panic, best way to check is when it happens the caps-lock light no longer responds to the caps-lock key.

This is normally caused by a buggy driver normally related to the graphics card (but not always). Are you using the open or closed drivers?

[dmeyer]

Hello Forum!

I'm currently using Quantal Quetzal with KDE 4.9.4, Compiz-effects enabled, on a 4 year old Samsung R40 notebook with ATI onboard graphics.

Don't use Compiz. Please use Kwin instead. Its better maintained, better integrated, has more effects and all round so much better than Compiz. Also which graphics drivers?

[private_lock]

@james

There is no hardware caps-lock-key. I have to issue Fn+F11 ... but forgot about it last freeze. I'll test it next time, I promise.

Support for my ati radeon on-board graphic was dropped by ati years ago. So I had to switch from the proprietary drivers to the open-source radeon. But now, that I wanted to check it, I found no /etc/X11/xorg.conf file anymore. So instead, I hope, this will do instead:

:~$ glxinfo | egrep 'vendor|renderer|version'
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
GLX version: 1.4
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS600
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 9.0
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

@dmeyer

Ups ... maybe I confused something here.

:~$ ps -e | egrep 'kwin|compiz'
 2075 ?        00:02:26 kwin

Looks like this is actually kwin?

I'm using those fancy 3D effects to switch windows and rotate a cube to switch virtual desktops. I enabled those via the System-Properties Gui for Desktop-Effects ... so maybe, this isn't compiz at all? Till today I thought, all the 3D stuff was summarized as compiz?

[james147]

Ups ... maybe I confused something here.

:~$ ps -e | egrep 'kwin|compiz'
 2075 ?        00:02:26 kwin

Looks like this is actually kwin?

I'm using those fancy 3D effects to switch windows and rotate a cube to switch virtual desktops. I enabled those via the System-Properties Gui for Desktop-Effects ... so maybe, this isn't compiz at all? Till today I thought, all the 3D stuff was summarized as compiz?

No, kwin has its own compositioning engine and does not need compiz to render fancy and 3d effects compiz is the window manager used in gnome environments to get these effects.