Windows stop responding to keyboard (13.1)

raela · 06-01-2010, 05:36 AM

I upgraded to 13.1 from 13.0 a few days ago. I have a Toshiba Satellite L3655D that I leave on constantly. Twice now, I have woken up to windows (urxvt and firefox) that don't accept keyboard input. I can paste into them and they respond, clicking is fine, but the keyboard either barely sends or is completely ignored - if I tap a bunch of keys, one or two might go through, eventually. New windows work fine, so I have to replace everything I have open. Anyone have any ideas of what I should check, what I can do?

edit: in case anyone in the future comes across this in a search - I switched to XFCE for 2 days and the issue didn't appear, but my other laptop with the same fluxbox settings also did not have any problems. I switched the original laptop back to fluxbox (and happened to upgrade the ATI drivers around the same time) and haven't had it happen since. If this happens to you, try restarting X.

rmjohnso · 06-02-2010, 04:02 PM

What is your DE (e.g., KDE, XFCE, etc.)?

raela · 06-02-2010, 07:33 PM

I'm using fluxfox 1.1.1. The frequency seems quite random - sometimes a window is fine when I wake up in the morning, but I've woken up, reset a window, went for a shower, and came back to it non-responsive to keyboard again.

astrogeek · 06-02-2010, 08:09 PM

If it only happens overnight I would check cron jobs running during that time frame.

Several years ago under Mandrake 10 as I recall, I had a normal system cron that would leave my box in some unusual states - including unresponsiveness. I tracked it down to a single line running a 'find' based operation. In fact, IIRC it was 'find' itself that had a bug, very frustrating at the time.

rmjohnso · 06-02-2010, 08:10 PM

Can you post your xorg.conf file, if you are using one? I wonder what would happen if you ran the following in a terminal window for a while to see if anything shows up when this happens:

Code:

tail -f /var/log/messages

I'm not sure I can think of much else since I don't have a lot of experience with fluxbox.

raela · 06-03-2010, 05:19 AM

I did find one cron entry that could be causing issues, so I removed that. It happens randomly as far as I can tell (it was fine overnight this time).

I looked through /var/log/messages and didn't see anything relevant. It happened a few times yesterday, but the log was full of --MARK-- entries. I do use a minimal xorg.conf since I use fglrx drivers.

Code:

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "aticonfig Layout"
	Screen      0  "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "Module"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
	Option	    "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
	Option	    "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
	Option	    "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
	Driver      "fglrx"
	BusID       "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
	Device     "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
	Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

raela · 06-03-2010, 02:29 PM

Sorry for the double post, but I'd just like to add that removing the cron job did not work. I came home to an unresponsive term, loaded a new one, opened firefox, then had firefox stop accepting keyboard input in the middle of me typing (the new term window also didn't respond to the keyboard, but a skype message I had open the whole time is still fine).

rmjohnso · 06-03-2010, 02:47 PM

Here are the only things I can think of trying:

1. Consider adding specific keyboard configurations to your xorg.conf to see if that clears anything up.
2. Try a different DE, like KDE or XFCE and see if this still happens.
3. Go to runlevel 3, leave something like top or links open overnight and see if the keyboard stops responding.

Sorry I can't provide anything specific.