System Freezing up when it wakes up from sleep or screensaver

[SteveThePirate]

Hi,

Just installed Kubuntu 12.04 on my Advent 4211 Netbook two days back changing from a Gnome Environment on it with Easy Peasy 1.7. I've managed to customize it to the way i want it but my only issue is when i either close the lid to put it to sleep or if i leave it for a while and let it go to screensaver for more than 5 mins, i go to wake the computer up to continue working on it the system becomes unresponsive. By unresponsive i mean the mouse will move but i'm unable to click on anything or even shutdown/restart the computer without holding in the power button and the clock is still at the time it went to sleep. In the odd occasion i've noticed if i give a minute after wakeup the clock fixes itself and the system revives itself but there are more occasions that it locks up and i have to do a hard restart.

Relevant Netbook Specs are as Follows: 2Gb DDR2, 1.6ghz Atom N270 Processor, Integrated Graphics Card.

Are there any fixes/solutions to this that i could work some voodoo on?

Help Much Appreciated,

Steve

[Snowhog]

Not an answer as to 'why' it happens, but as to your "i'm unable to click on anything or even shutdown/restart the computer without holding in the power button" statement. Use the MagicKey Sequence to perform a safe and controlled shutdown/reboot of your PC when it appears to be locked up/unresponsive.

Press and hold the Alt and PrtSc keys, then press and release, one at a time, the r, e, i, s, u, and b keys. This will cleanly bring down the OS and reboot your PC.

[SteveThePirate]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I tried the safe shutdown sequence you mentioned when it happened again but to no avail though the time i tried the mouse was unresponsive as well. However what i have noticed if this is any help, is that it happens mostly when on battery power. On AC it has crashed but i have noticed it is very rare. Is there a bug in 12.04 related to the AC and Battery on laptops and netbooks, when i did a search for this problem i noticed people have had this issue but on earlier versions of Kubuntu.

Steve

[vinnywright]

how big is your swap partition ...............for the system to suspend and revive well the swap space kneads to be as large ....or a bit larger than than the RAM I would sugest 3 gig for it.

VINNY

[SteveThePirate]

Hi,

The swap is at 3gb which is bigger than i normally put it, ususally i size it to the amount of RAM. More precisley it's sitting at 2.84gb according to the Partition Manager.

Steve

[james147]

how big is your swap partition ...............for the system to suspend and revive well the swap space kneads to be as large ....or a bit larger than than the RAM I would sugest 3 gig for it.

VINNY

Swap space only matters when you suspend to disk (aka hibernate), not when suspending to ram (aka sleeping). My laptop is able to sleep without any swap partition or file. Also, you only need enough swap space to contain the current amount of ram you are using, which can be more or less then the amount of system ram you have depending on how much you regularly use and how much ram you have. ie, if you have 4 gigs, but are only using 1gig of ram then you only need a little bit more then 1gig of swap to hibernate though its nice to have lots extra space just in case .

[vinnywright]

Swap space only matters when you suspend to disk (aka hibernate), not when suspending to ram (aka sleeping). My laptop is able to sleep without any swap partition or file. Also, you only need enough swap space to contain the current amount of ram you are using, which can be more or less then the amount of system ram you have depending on how much you regularly use and how much ram you have. ie, if you have 4 gigs, but are only using 1gig of ram then you only need a little bit more then 1gig of swap to hibernate though its nice to have lots extra space just in case .

OOPS yes you are correct ......I meant hibernate but was thinking suspend .........sory

VINNY

[SteveThePirate]

The SWAP was a good guess though, i'm thinking if its not anything to do with memory on wakeup then could it be a bug or an issue with kubuntu and netbooks?

[vinnywright]

have you tried leaving a terminal open with top running in it and seeing if some process is using a lot of CPU when it resumes (maybe some process is running umuck )

or when it's seemingly frozen can you ctrl +alt+F6 to a TTY and log in and run top?

VINNY

[SteveThePirate]

I'll give it a bash and report my findings

Steve

[SteveThePirate]

Hi guys,

Two things happened, firstly i went into terminal and ran top, then to recreate the conditions i took the AC adapter out to let it run on battery power and it completely froze up including the terminal. There was a similar bug issue in older versions of Ubuntu, but not in 12.04 which i had on this netbook for a short time before switching to Kubuntu as i'm not a fan of the new Ubuntu with Gnome3. Then after restarting i ran top on battery power and shut the lid and booted back up. No response from anything but the mouse and top was running ok and i noticed syslog was using up to 98% of the CPU. Any ideas about this?

Thanks

Steve

[james147]

Anything interesting in /var/log? (Might want to see if there are any huge logs)

[SteveThePirate]

Hi,

kern.log is 664.7mb, and syslog is 664.4mb have these any significance to the issue maybe?

Steve

[couchbotato]

Hi,

kern.log is 664.7mb, and syslog is 664.4mb have these any significance to the issue maybe?

Steve

Did you make clean fresh install of Kubuntu or upgraded from some earlier version which was Gnome based?

[praveenthivari]

Seems like similar problem affects me, Desktop freezes when i am watching youtube. Video stops and I have totally non responsive screen except for mouse, which i can move around.
Other thing is I can easily switch to tty1 and use commands (Shows that system as a whole is not freezed just , it's kde at fault)

Until now I thought it to be flash player bug, but I now realize that it may have something to do with screensaver. When kde tries to activate screensaver it freezes.(I haven't yet tested it though). I'll try it to test it report later.