On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:14 PM, John Jason Jordan<[email protected]> wrote: > A month or so ago I asked here for suggestions as to why my bluetooth > mouse stopped working. It happened after our August general meeting. I > had tried to suspend (which never works because I can't restore). I > hadn't tried suspend for a long time, so I tried it again just to see > if perhaps some of the constant updates had fixed things. Suspend was > still broken, and the only way to restore was to use the power button > and restart. After restarting the mouse was dead and nothing I could do > would get it working again. However, bluetooth was working fine because > I can connect to my phone, and "hcitool scan" finds the mouse. > > Drew suggested here that if bluetooth is working, then the problem must > be in X. So I switched from the nv driver to the nVidia driver and > restarted the computer. (Can't do Ctrl-alt-backspace on current > incarnations of Gnome.) When X came up the mouse was working. I > switched back to the nv driver and the mouse has continued to work. > That is, until this morning, when I discovered that overnight it died > again. Sadly, switching drivers did not restore it this time. > Otherwise, same symptoms - "hcitool scan" finds it, and "hcitool cc > <address> executes without error, but no mousie. I have another > bluetooth mouse and I get the same results with it. > > There's more. Ever since that fateful night the desktop font (Sans, 9 > pt) has been slightly messed up. The linespacing is too wide, and when > I type into a dialog box the text jumps down so the lower half of the > letters are cut off. Numerals also appear in various point sizes. > Changing to a different font does not help. > > And still more. I now have occasional system lockups. Once the capslock > light was flashing, but usually it just quietly locks up - no mouse, no > keyboard. There are no messages in /var/log/messages. Also, Firefox > decides to crash about once a day, always when clicking on a link in a > web page. When I restart Firefox the same link works fine. Previously > Firefox was always rock solid.
The flashing capslock and no input sounds like bad drivers. I've seen flaky video cards/drivers cause this sort of lockup. Typically you can still use SSH to remote into the machine and poke around. The crashing of FF sounds like, well no offense to Mozilla.org but, FF crashes a lot for me on every platform. Flash tends to greatly exacerbate the crashing and is used a lot in ads. Installing a FF plugin like adblock plus (if you don't already have it) can help. Have you checked to see if FF is getting killed by the out of memory killer? The logs might say but I forget which one to check. It's entirely possible that FF is using and then requesting too much memory and getting killed by the kernel. Adding swap can help if this is the case. Adding a swap file is easier than adding a swap partition, so don't worry about repartitioning just to get some swap. > > So I conclude that something is messed up in X and it is causing all > these woes. I have decided that I should just reinstall X. But there is > my problem. Google cannot tell me what "X" actually consists of. It's > probably more than one package, but which ones? Also, what will happen > if I uninstall X from the GUI? Like, Synaptic sort of needs a GUI, so > I'm not sure the reinstall will work properly. I'm thinking I should do > the whole uninstall-reinstall from the command line after booting to > Recovery Mode. That means I need a paper list of packages. Or maybe > it's Gnome, not X. I don't actually know where X ends and Gnome starts. Because you mention the font weirdness I would suspect Gnome and not X. I personally have observed Gnome causing font size weirdness and I know others who have had similar issues. I certainly wouldn't resort to reinstalling to troubleshoot this. If it's software packages that are goofed up, you should either be able to upgrade them or downgrade them, more likely, fix their broken config files. I've never run Ubuntu, but anecdotes from friends indicate that Ubuntu doesn't have the best QA in their updates. I think you're probably going to have to try and isolate some of the variables yourself. For example, run a different desktop than Gnome. Try running your kernel with fewer drivers. Check if your graphics chipset is known for bad linux support. Try the nVidia driver for a while and see if FF stops crashing. Check up on the FF memory usage during the day and see if there is a pattern with how much memory it is using when it crashes. Check the log after FF crashes to see if the OOM killer is mentioned. Does your computer overheat? Is your powersupply regulating properly (I had a problem where kernel threads would died after several days of uptime due to a bad powersupply once)? > The system is sort of working, so before I do something and make things > worse I decided to ask for suggestions. Oh, and "reinstall Jaunty" is > not a good option. It would take days to get all my programs > reinstalled, some of which required tweaks that I don't even remember. Eventually you will have to reinstall anyway. For example, if you get a new computer. Therefore, I would recommend investing some time into backing up your tweaks and configuration stuff now. HTH, Jason _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
