[ale] Evolution/mouse crash

Michael Hirsch mdhirsch at gmail.com
Mon Aug 30 16:59:18 EDT 2010


On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Richard Faulkner <rfaulkner at 34thprs.org> wrote:
> In an earlier posting I sought suggestions for a replacement for Evolution
> 2.28.3 but have yet to explore those and make any changes.  With that said
> I'm still running into periodic crashes of Evolution with the last one
> moments ago.  The symptoms have me curious and I wanted to see if anyone had
> some input as to what happened...
>
> I am running Fedora 12 (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686) on Asus A8N w/AMD X2
> (Manchester)/2GB and XFX 6800GS GPU's.
>
> I was doing a reply-all and editing the "Cc:" addresses when the crash
> happened.  Evolution goes "dark" and I loose all mouse input.  I couldn't
> click on a single thing and get a response anywhere on the desktop.  Noting
> that Eyes 2.28.0 was still running I knew the system was still running but I
> had lost the mouse as well as Evolution.  Keyboard input was still good so I
> did a force quit to Evolution and all was well.
>
> My question to those who are most learned in such things...why did a crash
> in Evolution trash all mouse input to the system outside of Evolution?
> Could this have been a failure in the mouse input or a combined failure in
> Evolution and mouse?  Inquiring minds want to know...

Sounds to me like evolution did a "server grab" and didn't let go.  In
X, a client (evolution) can grab the server and make sure that all
inputs get sent to that client.  This is pretty common with popups and
tooltips, I think.  If the client is poorly written and hangs, then
you are hosed.  All you inputs end up going to this unresponsive
program and it appears that things have crashed.  If you can somehow
kill the unresponsive client, or make it wake up, your system is okay
again.

I believe that the client can grab the mouse and keyboard separately.
So it is fairly common for your screen to freeze, but Alt-Tab lets you
change windows, or something like that.  Or sometimes the keys don't
work, but you can mouse around.

I suspect that this is what evolution is doing to you.  It is doing a
mouse grab, then hanging in some little part of the program.  Maybe it
is garbage collecting and will come back soon.  (or maybe not :( )

You say you were in the CC: field.  Do you have an LDAP server, or
other remote directory it might be querying?  That's when it usually
hangs for me.  Sometimes is comes back.

Michael



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