When I leave my work machine ideal for a short while (20 mins+) it has started to lock up, and by that I mean that I can move the mouse, and music will still be playing, but I can't interact with any thing, either by mouse or keyboard short cuts.
Doesn't have this problem if I lock the computer.


I've looked at the forums but I'm not totally sure what to call this kind of "crash".

I've had some problems with updates recently so it could be something to do with that.

I'm running 12.04 64bit, internally upgraded from 9.10-

AMD phenon 2 x4
16GB ram

Any thoughts would be appreciated

It could indeed be an X related issue, something gone bad with power management during the the upgrade ( Did you upgrade from 9.10 to 12.04 directly or incrementally over time ? ) or possibly a kernel issue.

You could try disabling CPU power management , or updating your kernel.


If compiz is activated, you might also want to try desactivating it

The most important question is:

What video card drivers are you running?

90% chance this is the problem. AMD/Nvidia have closed source drivers with a different set of bugs in every month's release. You can try a different one and roll the dice again or use an open driver which will be slower and have less features but should actually work.

As for upgrading over the top on Ubuntu - this is fundamental to the debian/ubuntu design and should work perfectly.

That very specific issue was happening to me as well when I was using the default music player installed in Linux Mint, not quite sure what it was, Rhytmbox I think. Just try installing anything else and see if it helps.

I'd strongly recommend a fresh install. I've done upgrades twice on Ubuntu. The first went fine (10.04 to 11.10), the second one left things massively screwed up when I went from 11.10 to 12.04 (different machine, where I had done a fresh install of 11.10 originally). Had programs crash constantly, no matter how simple. Backup and do a fresh install of Ubuntu (or Xubutu, or whatever flavor) and you'll have a lot less problems.

I had this issue in the past as well. Turned out for me, my graphics card fan was shot. The fresh install advice is good thought, as it takes so little time to install ?

I feel it's an X-related issue as well. You should pounce around the log files in /var/log/ and Xorg.log to see what you get.

Thanks for all the input, I'll have to wait for the next freeze to check some of the solutions :D

I would do a fresh install, but with only a month or so left of this PhD I don't want to figure out again how I got all the custom GPU programming interfaces to work.


Thanks again!

This what I basically did (kill shortcut is alt + print screen +k),
interestingly, this time I was in chrome and could still use the keyboard in chrome, also I could get into unity, with the windows key, just no alt-tab or mouse...

To anyone who might care, after many checks, I have discovered, the locking is caused by the linux version of spotify. I have come up with a work around, but at least it doesn't appear to be the main system.

Congrats on finding the problem. I'm sorry I'm late to this thread and missing the opportunity to troll with:

Why don't you switch to a stable OS like Windows 8?