Screen saver freezes up in Unity

[rdelahoz]

Binary package hint: unity

I upgrade from 10.10 to Unity a few days ago. Version 10.10 worked fine for several months, but when I install Unity the PC freezed up when the screen saver was activated. It doesn't happen right away, it happens like 5 minutes after the screen saver is activated. The PC is not frozen per se as I can move the mouse around, but the screen saver picture doesn't go away. Trying to see if the interface had to do with it, I change to the previous (old) interface and the same happened; the screen saver some how freezes up and I have to re-start the PC again. Any ideas? Maybe a patch is need it?

[CPKS (c-1)]

Same here using Acer 5620Z. Don't have (and never had) this problem with GNOME. Workaround: use GNOME!

[Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton)]

I've had this problem a couple times on my Toshiba A505-S6960, running a clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit alongside Windows 7. For me it doesn't occur very often when I leave it in screensaver for a while, but when it does happen I find that I cannot log back in and have to hold in my power button for a reboot. Very frustrating if you happened to have a lot of unsaved work open at the time it locks you out.

[Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton)]

Just happened to me again. I should note that even through the screen was stuck with a frozen image of my screensaver, the mouse cursor was still visible, and changed accordingly when hovered over where the password entry would be, and after logging in where window edges for resizing would be. I found that I can still log in, but the screen will stay stuck on the screensaver and not refresh, so it's still pretty much unusable at that point.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton)]

The freeze in bug #781402 (which this was marked as a duplicate of) specifically occurs when the lid is closed and reopened. This freeze occurs just from leaving the display alone long enough, not necessarily letting it go to sleep. I recall my screensaver freezing up like this even when having the display set to go into screensaver but never actually go to sleep. Unless both bugs have the same underlying cause, I'm not sure how they can be duplicates if they occur under different circumstances.

That being said, I haven't allowed my aforementioned laptop that's still running Natty to recreate the conditions for the freeze in a long while now, and I don't have any debug info available yet. I can confirm that I'm not getting this issue in Oneiric on my desktop, though, probably because that doesn't come with a screensaver by default.