Notification area causes X to freeze (caused by banshee)

[Ace Suares]

Binary package hint: banshee

Karmic 64-bit

I am not sure if it is banshee or notify-osd, but i've only seen it happen when banshee does the notificating.

This is what happens: at some point, a banshee notification pops up (f.i. to tell us what's playing). It might disappear completely or only half (30% transparent). Next thing that happens is that you can't touch the inside of a window anymore. Nothing works: can't type in it, can't block and copy things. (F.i. firefox is open; when the bug happens, you can't type a new URL in the address bar; can't fill in a form, etc). But you can still drag the window around the screen. You can also still move focus from one window to another (clicking on the window makes it active). You can't close or minimize the window.

The gnome-panel accepts clicks, and the icon depresses (like it was activated) but the attached program (for instance Force Quit) won't start. After that, you can't use the gnome-panel at all anymore. The only thing you can do is drag windows around the screen. (They stay 'clean', i.e. they don't 'trail' images of themselves around the desktop).

Going to another machine and remotely login (since Alt-Ctrl-F1 don't work no more neither) and look at top, there is (for example) a notify-osd which takes 6.9 % of total RAM (3GB ram in machine).

Killing the notify-osd (SIGHUP) frees up X. Suddenly the Force Quit app shows up (that was the last click on the Gnone-panel) and everything works again.

Instead of killing notify-osd, it's also possile to pkill -9 banshee. This will also free X.

I have no way of reliably reproducing the bug.

banshee:
  Installed: 1.5.1-1
  Candidate: 1.5.1-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.5.1-1 0
        500 http://bika karmic/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

notify-osd:
  Installed: 0.9.24-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.9.24-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.9.24-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://bika karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Hello Ace Suares

Is this issue reproducible with the latest updated karmic or lucid packages ?

Thanks
Fabio

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

Ace, any news about this issue?

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!