[16.10] How to recover MATE? AKA when the marco PID freezes, TTY7 becomes useless

Support & Help Requests
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#1

Hello,

I started having an issue some updates (2-3 weeks) ago: sometimes caja just stops responding having as impact to bring my whole MATE desktop useless and lost content.

For example again this morning, I opened up caja to access one of my network shares and yet again MATE entirely froze. What I mean by this is that I have to CTRL+ALT+F1 and then kill the mate-session PID in order to be able to recycle my X session. The caja screen just remains in full size grey and dies there.

Before I kill the PID “mate-session” I cannot open anything via the mouse nor do I seem to have problems changing desktops. However after I killed it, I loose all of my GUI bars(bottom) and menus(top) and seem to be unable to launch a terminal via hot keys (CTRL+ALT+T) to restart the MATE/caja PID nor do anything constructive to rescue my open session.

What would be my best solution for next time I am facing this issue? I find it painful having to reopen all of my apps especially when I am running some live systems in VirtualBox at the time of the crash.

Thanks in advance,

#2

During freeze you can change desktop but not open a terminal?
Very weird.
What Window manager option are you using?

#3

Thanks for your fast reply @ouroumov

During freeze the only things that I see are my desktop icons and I can right click and get that context menu, yes.

However issuing CTRL+ALT+T doesn’t do anything, am suspecting because the MATE PID went kapout.

I am also not sure how I can find this information out (Which window manager) but this is a vanilla setup with nothing experimental added (So I would assume default MATE is your answer).

Not sure what else I can provide? LOGs possibly?

Cheers,

#4

The window manager should be set under MATE Tweak -> Windows -> Window Manager

#5

My windows manager in use is Marco.

#6

Okay, let’s work with what you have.
Next time this happens, try the following:

  1. CTRL+ALT+F1, login to tty1
  2. Execute the command: DISPLAY=:0.0 marco --replace
  3. CTRL+ALT+F7
  4. If your session is now unfrozen, it means it was likely a crash of the window manager (marco), stop here and we’ll think about finding logs for that
  5. If session still frozen: CTRL+ALT+F2, login to tty2
  6. Execute the command: DISPLAY=:0.0 mate-panel --replace
  7. CTRL+ALT+F7
  8. If session now unfrozen, it’s likely due to a mate-panel crash
  9. If it’s still stuck, I’m open to ideas from anyone else

Edit: wait actually, before doing the above, let’s make sure this is not just caja crashing.

From tty1:

killall caja

1 Like
#7

Hello @ouroumov

First off thanks a bunch for your answer and sorry for not replying earlier but, believe it or not, I’ve j-u-s-t faced this issue again and tested what you’ve told me. Here are the results:

  1. Issuing killall caja from TTY1 proved the PID to respawn automatically and indefinately and did not fixed any display issues in TTY7;

  2. Killing the marco PID however did brought back all windows that had dissapeared however it did not fully fixed the issue. In other words, all windows came back up but my VM had downsized from 1280x1024 to 800x600 (I did not investigated the settings of the VM so I cannot confirm if display settings also regressed but I suspect they did not changed) and all virtual desktops stopped working. What I mean is that I actually had windows(browsers, text pads, cajas and 1x Oracle VirtualBox VM) opened on all 4 desktops and upon killing marco, they all assembled on the same desktop.

At this point not only have I lost all resizing buttons on all windows but I am also unable to simply drag and drop opened screens around. I had also lost all window previews from the virtual desktop pane and clicking on any other desktop from this panel did not changed desktop. It felt like TTY7 had lost the notion of desktop 1, 2, 3 and 4. However the top menus (Applications, Places, System & shortcuts) all worked. I was also able to launch caja and browse everything that I needed.

As a side node, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE doesn’t seem to be enabled on my system as issuing those keystrokes while both my X session being sane and insane did not worked. Before I posted, I was killing my session’s PID. With marco back up, I was able to logoff “gracefully” via “System” and then “Log Out”.

I am guessing that the next step is to check at the marco logs?

Please advise,

DLS

PS: I also do not know why but in the last couple of threads that I started it seems that the first reply is always marked as solved while I did not triggered this. I am finding this very frustrating as this behavior happens to me while using different platforms (OSes and browsers). Is there something that I need to check on my end?