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I have an Ubuntu 16.04.5 server installation with XFCE**. Every time I hit Alt-Gr + e (Euro sign), Alt-Gr + . (ellipsis) and other combinations involving the right alt key, XFCE completely freezes. This occurs also when entering these just on the desktop. The only way to recover is switch to another tty and issue sudo killall Xorg, then restarting XFCE.

I found this thread on the Arch forums: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=218524

But the solution does not apply, since I start XFCE from tty via $ xfce with

$ cat .xinitrc

session=${1:-xfce}

case $session in
    i3|i3wm           ) exec i3;;
    xfce|xfce4        ) exec startxfce4;;
    # No known session, try to run it as command
    *                 ) exec $1;;
esac

So no meddling with dbus here. How can I start tracking the problem down?

** No, I don't want xubuntu since I need the longer LTS support of core Ubuntu on this machine.

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  • All works fine using i3wm though. Dec 5, 2018 at 8:01

1 Answer 1

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The problem is resolved when starting the xfce-session from the terminal via startxfce4 directly instead of using xfce or startx with above ~/.xinitrcfile.

Note: Looking into top from another tty I gathered, that xfwm4 received SIGTTIN upon pressing Alt-Gr + [Key]. To recover the session, one can therefore pkill -CONT from another tty.

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  • It does also not occur when using Nouveau instead of nvidia-390 video drivers on my Quadro 2000 (i.e. I can use startx and it still won't crash). Mar 27, 2019 at 12:38
  • This resolved also an issue with awesomewm, although in my case I had to drop dbus-launch and launch awesome directly instead from .xinitrc - I don't think I would have figured out this was related to signals, thanks chap.
    – voneiden
    Jan 4, 2022 at 20:49

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