Programs not accepting input?

[Duane Whitty]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> In the last month or two I've seen increasing occurrences of programs
> refusing keyboard input after they've been running for a while
> (between hours and days).  They still respond to the mouse.  At first
> I thought it was hardware, but it happens on a number of different
> machines, and only with certain programs, all of them X clients.
> Here's an overview (system names are simply to show that they're
> different machines).
>
> - System echunga, running a version of the klondike game that used to
>   come with the X distribution.
> - System wantadilla, running firefox.  After it refuses keyboard
>   input, I can open a new window with the mouse, and the new window
>   accepts input.  The old one still doesn't.
> - The same problem again with system teevee.
>
> wantadilla had what I think were hardware problems a couple of weeks
> ago, so I changed the entire system board and memory (but kept the
> disks).  The new system is stable, but the problems continue.  echunga
> and teevee have been up for months:
>
> echunga       up  49+02:25,     1 user,   load 0.60, 0.50, 0.35
> teevee        up 100+22:08,     0 users,  load 0.06, 0.31, 0.28
> tvremote      up  36+21:07,     0 users,  load 0.18, 0.04, 0.01
> wantadilla    up  18+02:44,     3 users,  load 0.46, 0.38, 0.49
>
> One thing that the machines have in common is that they all run x2x
> (which joins X servers).  echunga and wantadilla run one instance, and
> teevee runs another instance with tvermote, which I don't think has
> shown any problems.  I've been running x2x for years as well, and only
> one of the machines has had a software upgrade anywhere near the time
> when the problem began.  Here are the versions:
>
> FreeBSD echunga.lemis.com 6.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #0: Sun Feb  5 14:15:02 CST 2006     grog at echunga.lemis.com:/usr/obj/src/FreeBSD/6-STABLE/src/sys/ECHUNGA  i386
> FreeBSD teevee.lemis.com 5.3-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p5 #4: Sun Mar 13 14:58:24 CST 2005     grog at teevee.lemis.com:/usr/obj/src/FreeBSD/TEEVEE/src/sys/TEEVEE  i386
> FreeBSD tvremote.lemis.com 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #0: Fri Nov  5 04:19:18 UTC 2004     root at harlow.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
> FreeBSD wantadilla.lemis.com 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #1: Tue Jul 12 11:57:56 CST 2005     grog at wantadilla.lemis.com:/usr/obj/src/FreeBSD/6-CURRENT/src/sys/WANTADILLA  i386
>
> Does this ring a bell with anybody?  Any idea how to start debugging?
> The fact that new firefox windows accept input suggests that it's
> somewhere in X.
>
> Greg
>   

Hi,

Well I feel a little out of my depth here but I have been
having a similar yet different problem.  What I have noticed
is that sometimes when I try select a running application
from my KDE panel via mouse the switch does not happen.
Switching in these cases will usually work via Alt-Tab however.
The program being switched to seems to be functional.  Maybe
this is just a problem with kpanel.  Like I said, I'm out of my depth here.
To recover I usually end-up killing the process I tried to
switch too.

Even though I quite literally spend fourteen to sixteen hours
per day with my FreeBSD system there is only so much a person
can learn in a given period of time.  This is one of those issues that
for now I have simply shrugged, adjusted, and carried on with
what I was doing.

Here are my system details

FreeBSD dwpc.dwlabs.ca 6.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE #1: Fri Mar 
24 19:34:58 AST 2006     
root at dwpc.dwlabs.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DWPC-200603230410  i386

3:41AM  up 1 day,  5:48, 3 users, load averages: 0.03, 0.10, 0.08

X11R6 XOrg 6.9.0, KDE 3.5

I have noticed this in 6.0-RELEASE as well

I hope this is at least in some way useful.  Maybe
it is not even related.  Other than this I have nothing
more to add except that if anyone has any ideas
maybe I could help test them out.

--Duane