Thread for those experiencing freezes in Maya/Mate.

[kmb42vt]

In another ongoing thread on this forum for those that are experiencing system freezes in Maya/Cinnamon edition, there are a few that are also experiencing freezes in Maya/Mate edition as well . The freezing problem in Cinnamon is starting to point towards a problem in Cinnamon itself but troubleshooting continues. So in order to separate one freeze from another so to speak, I'm starting this thread for those experiencing system freezes in the Mate edition.

Link to System freezing - Mint 13 Cinnamon: viewtopic.php?f=90&t=103054&start=0

I myself experience the freezing problem with Cinnamon on a laptop of mine but not with Mate. Maya/Cinnamon runs fine on my desktop though--no freezes.

(Moderator: If this thread belongs somewhere else, please move. I'll request deletion if nothing happens in a week or so )

[Penurious Penguin]

Running Maya with Mate and occasionally having system freezes where all but the mouse-cursor becomes dysfunctional. The cursor has movement but no effect and no other input of any sort is accepted, of course, including Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and power button. Hard reboot via sustained holding of the power button is necessary.

The freeze/crash often occurs for me when using Firefox, though many others report using Libre Office during the event and I'm sure more than a few other things could have the same effect.

Specs:
Mint Maya (Mate) 64bit
6GB RAM with No Swap
Asus Laptop K53E (Intel i5) w/integrated intel graphics

[KBD47]

On my desktop computer I inherited all the same freezing in Mint 13 that I had in all the Ubuntu 12.04's: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu. All froze on my desktop computer, made no difference live cd or full install, both ways froze. Also inherited on Mint 13 the suspend bug from Ubuntu on two of my netbooks. All in all Ubuntu 12.04/Mint 13 has been a massive fail for me, only one of my four computers can run Mint 13 Mate or Cinnamon. For me these bugs are laid at Ubuntu's door. Could run all four of my computers on Ubuntu 11.10 and Mint 12 without bugs/freezing. My solution is to use other operating systems, except for my one computer, I'm running Xubuntu 11.10, SolusOS 1, LMDE.
kbd47

[Penurious Penguin]

@KBD47
Regarding the suspend bug you mentioned, have you looked at this: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=103530 ??

I am also right on the edge of looking for an alternative OS, but have not had the best of luck running Arch Linux on laptops. If this bug persists, I'll give Arch another go. Trying LXDE and Awesome in the meantime.

[KBD47]

Thanks. I don't have have Asus laptops.

[craigjl77]

I am having the problem on Mate 64b. It's not just a Cinnamon problem.

Random things cause it like opening mail in Evolution or editing a file from Caja, but is mega random. When it happens the system freezes totally, the only way out is to hold in the pwr button. When the machine re-starts there is nothing obvious in the sys or kernel logs.

Am open to suggestions on how to do some debugging ie turning up the log levels?? Running a debug kernel?? Sending machine specs.

To say the it is very annoying, would be an understatement.

[hairybiker]

I have freezing issues under mate 64b but they seem to be relate to firefox.
If I switch to a tty then log in and killall firefox it plays nicely again. Before that the mouse would move but not click on anyting and alt-tab did nothing.
Update on this one:
When I experience the problem in FF I also see NO sites in Last Pass (a FF add on). Had FF freezing on me 3 times today, usually when loading a new page.

[kinzeron]

This is not really related to Mate, it seems to be more related to XOrg, gtk and/or the kernel.

When the system freezes the audio keeps working, the network layer is still working - so basically the threading system is still working. what does not work is graphics. The problem can be seen simply when opening a link in skype (or other app) that direct to a firefox new page -> The system will freeze after what appears a flash (screen goes black then the colors return).

It is occuring on an old asus laptop.

[kmb42vt]

I have freezing issues under mate 64b but they seem to be relate to firefox.
If I switch to a tty then log in and killall firefox it plays nicely again. Before that the mouse would move but not click on anyting and alt-tab did nothing.
Update on this one:
When I experience the problem in FF I also see NO sites in Last Pass (a FF add on). Had FF freezing on me 3 times today, usually when loading a new page.

Since you're experiencing the freeze when using Firefox then you need to eliminate your current Firefox profile first before trying anything else.

Make a backup of your bookmarks database via the bookmark manager (the .json file not the .html file) and then use the Firefox Profile Manager to create a new profile and use that in place of your old one for testing purposes. Restore your bookmarks database to the new profile andI would recommend installing the AdBlock Plus extension to keep ads at a minimum (too many badly coded flash based ads on a site can cause problems) but keep extensions minimal at first. Use the new profile for a decent period (pound on it) and see if the freeze still occurs. If it doesn't, you know that your old FF profile was the problem.

If it turns out that the freeze was caused by your old profile then, one at a time, install the extensions you were previously using to the new profile, using Firefox for a period of time after each new extension installation. This is to make sure it wasn't one of the extensions that was causing Firefox to freeze and/or a conflict between two or more extensions.

[kinzeron]

Some news,

When I deactivate the nvidia driver, the system is actin normally, no freezing! when reactivating problems return. anyone experiencing the problem on non nvidia cards ?

[kmb42vt]

Some news,

When I deactivate the nvidia driver, the system is actin normally, no freezing! when reactivating problems return. anyone experiencing the problem on non nvidia cards ?

Not quite the same problem. On my desktop PC if I use the Nvidia driver for my GT 430 video card I have no freezing problems with Maya/Cinnamon but MDM always crashes on boot/reboot 1 or 2 seconds after appearing. Uninstall the Nvidia driver and MDM is fine. I switched to LightDM and problem solved. However, On my Thinkpad R61 laptop which uses an Intel chipset (965), Intel wireless and Intel video hardware (X3100 HD), Maya/Cinnamon constantly freezes especially when using LibreOffice. No closed source video drivers needed as all the Intel drivers are part of the kernel itself. Go figure.

That's what is so frustrating about this problem. Even though the indications are starting to point to Cinnamon as the problem (but could well be a combination of Cinnamon/Ubuntu binaries/kernel/driver/java conflicts as well), the problem may or may not manifest itself depending on the hardware configuration and there are thousands of different hardware configurations. makes you want to beat your head against the wall.

[horzaguchabald]

Interesting I was running Mint 13 Cinnamon on VMware Fusion, and my Mac has an Nvidia card in, I installed VMware Tools, rebooted, installed Chromium and then opened up Software manager. After a bit "thinking" my machine froze up and then presented my with a quarter of the screen viewable, killed xorg, reconfigured it, all sorts of stuff couldnt rescue it.

Now I have installed MATE I got the black areas in the screen on the live image while installing... I've not had this problem ever on any other *buntu based distros.

I'll be turning off all accelerators in VMware tools, and not passing to Nvidia card.

Im sure this will eventually clean itself up via an update one day shortly, Oh well had been planning to test this distro as the base OS for my new Lenovo when it arrives but I might go for a clean Ubuntu and run the other OS's as VM's later... I'll continue playing and just rolling back until I can identify what this is caused by consistantly - fresh install of MATE version just updating itself now!

[kinzeron]

Those experiencing freezing with firefox, can someone confirm this:

Open firefox and then try to open another instance via mate menu. this should reproduce the freeze. On my machine firefox freezes when another instance is openned (100% reproduction rate)

It does not happens when I try to open a new window in firefox but only on new instances (i.e. trying to open a link from skype, or open a new instance from mate menu).

[Penurious Penguin]

I opened another instance of Firefox through the menu as you suggested and had no problems. I have little doubt that it may do it for you, but this is probably all way beyond browsers. Freezes continue for me, but rarely and seemingly randomly.

[kinzeron]

Updates: After few tries, my problem seems to be narrowed down to mate-settings-daemon and/or DBus. I updated the nvidia driver to 302.17, and got an interesting error in mate-settings-daemon:

Code: Select all

$ mate-settings-daemon --sync
The program 'mate-settings-daemon' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)'.
  (Details: serial 374 error_code 2 request_code 153 minor_code 30)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)


And an unknown error related to D-Bus.

Any mint/mate developer knows about this ? it doesn't occure when running the vesa driver, only using nvidia drivers and with certain system configuration.

Regards,

[ingeva]

I opened another instance of Firefox through the menu as you suggested and had no problems. I have little doubt that it may do it for you, but this is probably all way beyond browsers. Freezes continue for me, but rarely and seemingly randomly.

Same here. I do not think that this is a problem with MATE. Cinnamon has similar problems.
I have updated to kernel 3.3.6:

http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/05/how-to-install-linux-kernel-336-via-ppa.html

The procedure is described for Ubuntu but since Mint is based on Ubuntu it's still valid.
I haven't had any freezes since I upgraded, but it's too soon to say that it's 100% stable.

If 3.3.6 works (or not) you can also try kernel 4.4.4:

http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/how-to- ... 44-in.html

I have upgraded but not yet booted this version, so let's cross our fingers ....

[Penurious Penguin]

Thanks ingeva,

I've tried your advice and hope it works. There is also something worth mentioning, though it is a bit confusing. I had gone without a freeze for nearly a week of constant use, until... Until I did a partial update, which included a new addition of firefox. Suddenly, the system was freezing every hour or so. While I know it is not firefox, I am now suspicious that there is, however, something about firefox which may bring out the bug. But it may have been other components of the update -- I don't know. But the update certainly had a negative effect.

EDIT:-3 (8.1.2012):
Updated to 3.4.6-generic and had another freeze. However, and interestingly, it was slightly different this time. I was able to perform a half-successful ctrl-alt-backspace, but I still had to hard-reboot. Overall, 3.4.6 is pretty solid in general and unlike 3.3.6, it uses less resources, for example, sensors was showing a constant 56Celsius, while in 3.4.6 sensors shows 46-48Celsius -- a big difference. Also, an interesting - but unrelated - link about nvidia privilege-escalation: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/08/0 ... ation-hole

EDIT-2 (7.30.2012):
Still no freezes and system seems generally improved. I can confidently call this issue "SOLVED" for myself.

EDIT-1:
Switched to 3.3.6-030306-generic and have experienced no freezes yet. Got some errors with upgrade along the way but overcame them and all went well enough. So, thanks again ingeva, I think this may have worked. I guess I should have tried it sooner.

[munin]

I use Mate 32 bit with nvidia driver on an Acer laptop, and the system freezes only when I watch TV after about ten minutes. First the screen goes black and then the sound disappears. I have the same problem both in Firefox and Opera. Problem with nvidia or flashplayer have been suggested, and some solutions have been tried. I have solved a couple of problems before with using apt-get install, so I think I will try that again with suspected programs. There are probable several factors involved, so one can at least learn something by using the trial and error method.

[juniper]

Same here. It was okay for about a week now I can expect a freeze/crash, to a black screen sometimes, with no possible input from mouse or keyboard, every hour or even less. So needs a hard restart. MATE boots normally so no problems there. Most problems seem to arise when using streaming video on Firefox but it does happen with other apps such as gnome-subtitles. Again video related so I'm beginning to suspect my graphics chip. I'll try the Firefox profile suggestion but I think the problem goes deeper. One thing in Firefox is if I spin the mouse wheel too fast to scroll quickly down a page, also brings on a freeze.
As an aside this happened the same on Fedora 17 which was one of the reasons I'm trying out Mint now. This is why I suspect graphics.

My machine

Pegatron - IPMSD H61 MB
Intel Duo Core 2.4Ghz
Ram 2Gb
Chipset - Intel Series 6 /C200 Sandybridge
Intel 2nd generation integrated i915 VGA/Digital
Kernel 3.2.0-23 (generic)
Monitor LG MX235D

[kmb42vt]

Same here. It was okay for about a week now I can expect a freeze/crash, to a black screen sometimes, with no possible input from mouse or keyboard, every hour or even less. So needs a hard restart. MATE boots normally so no problems there. Most problems seem to arise when using streaming video on Firefox but it does happen with other apps such as gnome-subtitles. Again video related so I'm beginning to suspect my graphics chip. I'll try the Firefox profile suggestion but I think the problem goes deeper. One thing in Firefox is if I spin the mouse wheel too fast to scroll quickly down a page, also brings on a freeze.
As an aside this happened the same on Fedora 17 which was one of the reasons I'm trying out Mint now. This is why I suspect graphics.

My machine

Pegatron - IPMSD H61 MB
Intel Duo Core 2.4Ghz
Ram 2Gb
Chipset - Intel Series 6 /C200 Sandybridge
Intel 2nd generation integrated i915 VGA/Digital
Kernel 3.2.0-23 (generic)
Monitor LG MX235D

After doing some rather in-depth research about these random freezes for those using MATE, it may very well be that it's a bug in the 3.2 kernel that causes problems with certain graphics hardware. Updating to a newer kernel (3.3.6 or 3.4 series) might be worth a try. This freezing problem is not widespread though. Like the Cinnamon freezing problem, it only affects a relatively small group of users.

By the way, if anyone is interested, after much troubleshooting and testing the freezing problem with Maya/Cinnamon was isolated down to a problem in the "muffin" source code. A fix for muffin is now available via the "Romeo" repository and should be in "Main" repository shortly. Once that's done then Cinnamon 1.5 builds will out out shortly after that via the "Romeo" repositories (according to Clem).