Re: Gnome-Shell Window Management Freezes

[Michael Wilber <mwilber eng ucsd edu>]

Justin Brown <justin brown    > writes:
> Hello,
>
> I've been experiencing trouble with Gnome Shell on just one of my
> Haswell-based systems since this past summer, and I'm trying to
> resolve it. ... ...

This is a long shot, but you wouldn't happen to be on a thinkpad with a
broken touchpoint, would you?

I had your exact same problem: from time to time (but most frequently when
first starting gnome-shell or when waking up from sleep), GNOME shell's
window management would just freeze up. When this happened for me,
gnome-shell would write the following to stderr:

    pushModal invocation of begin_modal failed

One difference: switching to a different tty did not work for me, and
running 'gnome-shell --replace' also did not seem to work. Sometimes running
'killall gnome-shell; sleep 1; gnome-shell --replace' did work.

I also had an unrelated problem that started before I switched to
GNOME-shell: My trackpoint's middle mouse button is completely broken. It
constantly spams middle mouse clicks, several dozens of them per second!
This is fine when I don't have anything in my clipboard, but even moving my
mouse over the input terminal would constantly paste whatever I had copied
into the terminal as a command, which was infuriating.

Before I switched to GNOME-shell last week, I would have this in my .xinitrc
as a workaround:

    xinput set-button-map "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" 1 0 3 4 5

When I switched to GNOME shell, I would configure it to run the above as a
startup command. However, I figured out that sometimes the above command
disables the middle mouse button while it was already pressed down, so the
shell wouldn't receive a mouseup event.

That's what caused my GNOME shell problems.

Putting this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-disabletrackpoint.conf made my
problem go away by disabling the trackpoint middle mouse button before gdm
or gnome-shell could get confused:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Disable my middle trackpad button... So sad"
        MatchProduct "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"
        Option "ButtonMapping" "1 0 3 4 5"
EndSection

Hope that helps,