Bizarre Marco (?) behavior

[jiawen]

I booted into Windows yesterday to try a game I hadn't played in a long time, and once I booted back into Linux Mint, I started having bizarre problems with windows. The panels eventually become totally unresponsive, meaning I can't actually start any GUI programs. Window management icons (minimize, maximize, close) are also unresponsive. Ctrl+Alt+Del brings up the "Shut down this system now?" menu, but most of the time, the buttons are completely unresponsive, meaning that the system automatically shuts itself down after 60 seconds. (Or would, if I hadn't had an unsaved document in Pluma that prompts for saving, and allows me to cancel the shutdown.) Alt+F2 has so far sometimes allowed me to run programs, but it's also sat there, frozen and unresponsive, on top of whatever window I have behind it. Clicking the buttons in the Alt+F2 window act like I'm clicking buttons on the next window down (selecting text in Firefox, for example, where I'm clearly selecting text in the Alt+F2 window). I tried killall marco, but that just got rid of window borders; panels and menus are still unresponsive. Alt+F2 is now also unresponsive, so I'm going to submit this post before I do a restart because I can't type all this again. (And I can't copy and paste it into a text file because other windows are nonresponsive.) I'm still able to type in Firefox, luckily, but I can't get any other windows to focus.

What is going on?!

Edit: More symptoms: I just tried to restart but didn't immediately respond to the Pluma "Save changes to ... before closing?" dialog, and it is now frozen. Seriously, what is going on here?

Edit 2: After a hard reset, I was reminded that panels are taking a lot longer to start once I've logged in. The desktop background comes in immediately, the desktop icons come in shortly after that, but the panels take about 10 seconds more to pop in. This has been true every time I've logged in since yesterday.

Also, I did grep error /var/log/dmesg and it only returned this:

Code: Select all

[   36.575792] EXT4-fs (sda8): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro

Doesn't seem likely to cause panel/window manager/Mate problems, does it?

Also, forgot to mention: I have GKrellM running and it doesn't show any spikes in CPU or memory usage when the window misbehavior starts.

Edit 3: I've also been having problems with Caja recently. It takes a looong time to show what's in a given directory, sometimes many dozen seconds before it will bring up the contents. Also, when I click on the Gnome program menu, the icons for the programs sometimes take a second or two to pop in. Could that all be related?

Edit 4: Trying to think of what's changed since last I booted into Linux, the only thing I could think of was that I installed the Windows drivers for my Logitech headset. That shouldn't affect the Linux workings of the device, should it? But I noticed that a) when I try to use the volume dial on the headset, it no longer functions right (seems to be trying to act like a mouse scroll wheel, rather than a volume control), and b) doing this multiple times seems to set off the bad behavior by Mate. Also, I had Terminal running Top when the latest misbehavior happened. This time, the CPUs started spiking, and Top showed that Mate-Session (I think it was) was using 99% of CPU time. Is my headset part of the problem somehow? I rebooted, this time with the headset completely unplugged from the machine. I'll see how it goes this time.

Also, when I rebooted, I timed how long it takes for various things to show up while the session starts. From the startup sound, here are the times:

Desktop background: 15 secs.
GKrellM: 20 secs.
Desktop icons: 50 secs.
Panels: 57 secs.

A full minute just to have panels? What is going on here?

[jiawen]

The problem definitely seems related to my headset. I hit the reset button on the headset wireless dongle and menus stopped freezing up. Or at least they seemed to... A few minutes ago, the headset stopped outputting sound (tried every possible mute/volume setting, to no avail) and Quod Libet started acting weird: it wouldn't output any sound, but would show that a track was playing, but at a very slow rate (like it would show one second of track time passed in five seconds of actual time). I was worried that another menu/window freeze was coming, so I restarted. Now the headset seems to work okay, but when I started Quod Libet, it gave me a "GStreamer encountered a general resource error." on one track. Perhaps something in the sound system is not playing fair with CPU time?

[jiawen]

It seems like the problem might be that some G930 functions are mapped to other devices' functions (mouse buttons or whatever), so lots of use is causing the system to get lost under an avalanche of (contradictory?) commands. But I don't understand a) why the CPU isn't immediately spiking under this condition or b) how to fix it. [url=http://elgenieben.blogspot.ro/2013/10/logitech-g930-headset-g-keys-under.html]This page[/url] seems to give a howto on fixing the input, but I've never understood how to edit input mapping in xorg. (How do you know which keys map to what? How do I know what function is which? For example, when I run xinput get-button-map [device ID] on the headset, it just tells me "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14", which doesn't tell me anything.) How do I fix this?

[jiawen]

Still don't have this figured out. I've gone back and forth a few times lately with booting up Windows, and it seems that each time I have some new variant of the G930 problems. There have been some problems in Windows (OS not recognizing the headset, using power faster than it ever has in Linux, sometimes working or not depending on which USB outlet I plug it into, some other things too, I think). And it's still giving me trouble in Mint. This time in Mint, I'm having trouble getting my mouse to correctly interact with windows (either window decorations or window interior content), depending on whether or not the headset is plugged in. If I unplug it, the mouse problems seem to go away. Last time I had Linux booted up, the headset kept cutting out on me, as if signal had been lost. But before, that's only happened when I went into a different room with thick walls between me and the headset wireless dongle. This time, I was sitting less than a yard away from the dongle, with nothing between except air.

It sounds like the headset is somehow getting read as a USB mouse/pointer device, and my actual pointer device (a Kensington trackball) and the headset are not playing nicely with each other. But how do I fix this? I could still really use some help -- thanks in advance!