GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 699488
Gnome shell locks up
Last modified: 2014-08-23 11:43:28 UTC
Ver: 3.6.3.1-1.fc18 I have several situations when my gnome-shell just locks up. The mouse moves but nothing else responds. Sometimes I can CTRL-ALT-F2 and pkill gnome-shell and it will come back. I can't track down the cause in most cases but there is one that can cause it. If I have a vpn connection to work. AutoFS has a NFS mount to a work drive on their network. I open the a file via nautilus -> gedit. Then the VPN dies. In this case a lot of the time the nfs mount hangs. (even df on the command-line hangs) This will cause gnome-shell to stop responding. I think something in gnome-shell might have a link dependent on the network. This is bad in my opinion as you can't fix the network problem if the desktop stops responding. I wanted to report it in case someone could duplicate the situation and fix. (I can't consistently duplicate it but if it happens this is one of the cases) Also this has happened with Gnome-Shell for the last few versions so it's not specific to any version.
I can confirm this bug, seems it's got worse for me in 3.10. To me it appears this lock-up happens especially when I interact with the notification area, like picking up an empathy chat atl. What happens is that I can still move the mouse around but can neither click nor type. My only solution so far is to Ctrl-Alt-F2 into a console and restart gdm. The issue can be observed on all my four machines. Current SW Setup: Arch Linux Gnome 3.10 Maybe this helps: It appears as if something 'intercepts' all the mouse / key events and prevents it from subsequent handling.
Related to bug 727653
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 727365 ***