Mint randomly freezes, but I can still move the mouse cursor

[Acromarts]

Hello!

I am using a Linux mint 14 (32-bit) USB boot-drive. I booted up, made an account, established wifi and installed some progams.

The problem is that Mint will randomly freeze upon performing an action. The first time it happened, it was when I tried to add GIMP to the panel. The second time, was when I tried to change the Mint theme.

The screen will freeze, and I cannot click ANYTHING. I can still freely move the cursor, but can't click on anything. Pressing keys has no effect either.

I can still use the touchpad sound switch, wifi switch and volume slider on my notebook. It shows absolutely nothing on screen, but still plays the notification sounds.

When this freeze occurs, the only option is to hold down the power button until my laptop cuts the power.


SIDE NOTE: Now that I've booted again, I can't change the theme anymore. Double clicking an icon has no effect.


Does anyone know what could be causing this freezing issue?

[karlchen]

Hello, Acromarts.

When this freeze occurs, the only option is to hold down the power button until my laptop cuts the power.

Sure, this is the only option? Have your tried the key combination <ctrl><alt><backspace>. This shortcut should kill and relaunch the GUI and return you to the graphical Mint login screen.

In the early months of Ubuntu 12.04 / Mint 13 I suffered from freezing desktop GUIs, too. Pressing <ctrl><alt><backspace> would stop the GUI and return me to the logon screen. Though in the long run this was a nuisance, it saved me from hard rebooting the system and from potential filesystem corruption.

In my case, the solution was to add the parameter acpi_osi=linux to the Grub commandline which launches Linux. Yet, this solution was pretty specific to the hardware of the affected machine. It may or may not work in your case.

Does anyone know what could be causing this freezing issue?

Basically, a lot of constellations could cause this. Please, run

Code: Select all

inxi -Fx

inside a terminal window and post the screen output here. It will give us a good idea of your system hardware and configuration. Maybe this will ring a bell.

Kind regards,
Karl

[Acromarts]

The keyboard shortcut worked indeed .

I haven't had any crashes except forr just once after I posted this topic.

Many thanks!