Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 flaky since Friday's updates!

Paul Smith paul at mad-scientist.net
Sun Jan 18 20:20:35 UTC 2015


I installed Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 on my system at work back in November or
so and it's been working great for me up until Friday.

On Friday I installed a bunch of packages that were available for update
during last week, and my desktop suddenly got very flaky.

What happens is that the desktop hangs frequently: every few minutes it
stops responding for about 20 seconds, then it starts working again
(most of the time).

When it's not responding the mouse will move, but can't be used to
select anything (no buttons appear to work, and the cursor doesn't
change shape when moved over elements of the desktop).  Other desktop
elements stop responding: for example I have a CPU / Network IO graph
applet on my panel and those stop updating while it's frozen.

If I have a window selected which accepts keyboard input, then sometimes
I can type there while it's frozen, but not always (I think).

Also sometimes (seems to be if I'm trying to select something with a
click just when things hang) the entire desktop will hang and never come
back, at least as long as I've been willing to wait.

When the desktop is hung I can switch to a console window with C-A-F1,
or I can log in remotely to my system via SSH from another system; this
access is working fine even while the desktop is still hung, so the
problem doesn't appear to be in the base system.  It seems to be an
issue with the desktop or graphics somehow.

I've rebooted a few times to see if it clears up, but it doesn't.

I've checked system logs and dmesg and nothing is printed.  The CPU load
(viewed via top from the console) is not increased while the desktop is
hung up.

My system is an i7-3770 3.4GHz (8 cores) with 16G RAM and a 1T HDD for
the system partitions and storage and a 500G SSD for my active work.  It
uses an Intel graphics controller Xeon E3-1200 and I have two monitors
plugged into it.  The system has wireless but I've disabled it and I'm
using standard 100Mbit CAT5 network cable.

As I mentioned, everything about the system is fine when accessed via a
console interface/SSH (not using the desktop), so I don't think it's an
issue with the CPU, memory, disk, network, or keyboard.

What can I do?!?!  I can't work like this...





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