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Every now and then everything appears to lock up and I can't really do anything. I can move my mouse and it will reflect that on the screen but I can't really do anything else. Sitting long enough it is apparent the clock isn't updating. I can use Ctl-Alt-F1 but I don't really know what to do to make anything responsive. I am using gnome-shell. I don't know if anything similar would happen if I used Unity instead.

Edit: By switching to a text terminal and putting the computer to sleep and bringing it up back I was able to get the GUI terminal to be responsive. I'm still interested in why this could be happening and an easier way to bring it to be responsive after it happens.

Edit the dos: It appears after working with 11.10 for a while that the only time that this occurs is when I'm reading a pdf using evince. If I load evince from the terminal I get this always:

(evince:6963): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: g_object_set_valist: construct property "enable-gestures" for object `EvView' can't be set after construction

Could this have something to do with the computer locking up?

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  • I'm no longer able to check if answers to this question work - The computer in question is no more.
    – Dason
    Nov 18, 2011 at 19:46

2 Answers 2

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Try switching to a different tty (Ctrl-Alt-F1), login in, and then at the prompt type:

gnome-shell --display :0 --replace

Then switch back to the GUI (Ctrl-Alt-F7).

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I had this happen after locking the screen, in the middle of the Oneiric upgrade. I fixed the problem, temporarily, by killing gnome-screensaver (oddly, its name was cut off in the pgrep output). I don't know if this will cause problems with gnome-screensaver. Since it will daemonize when run (in theory), you can just start it again.

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  • I'll give this a try. Are you suggesting to kill gnome-screensaver until I need it or to kill it if everything locks up?
    – Dason
    Oct 22, 2011 at 13:55
  • Kill it if things lock up, and then try to restart it. As this is an intermittent issue, if restarting it causes problems you can reboot instead; that should spawn a new "proper" instance of it. If you don't restart the process somehow, I think you could have problems with the screensaver not starting on time (or at all).
    – Kevin
    Oct 25, 2011 at 3:32
  • This didn't end up working for me.
    – Dason
    Oct 27, 2011 at 23:20
  • Does rebooting fix the issue?
    – Kevin
    Oct 29, 2011 at 1:53
  • If I reboot the computer everything goes back to normal. But a lot of times I don't want to have to do that. Putting the computer to sleep and bringing it back up actually fixes the problem as well but that is a pain. I would like to know what could be causing this and how to prevent it from happening.
    – Dason
    Oct 29, 2011 at 2:43

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