i3: i3 locks up randomly, unable to click or switch tabs
Output
of i3 --moreversion 2>&- || i3 --version:
_Binary i3 version: 4.14 (2017-09-04) © 2009 Michael Stapelberg and contributors Running i3 version: 4.14 (2017-09-04) (pid 15211) abort…) Loaded i3 config: /home/elonsatoshi/.config/i3/config (Last modified: Wed 20 Sep 2017 08:25:08 PM CDT, 243725 seconds ago)
The i3 binary you just called: /usr/bin/i3 The i3 binary you are running: i3 _
URL to a logfile as per http://i3wm.org/docs/debugging.html:
_http://logs.i3wm.org/logs/5709717443706880.bz2_
What I did:
Nothing. It happens while I’m using Icecat. It happens while I’ve
activated i3lock and am gone for a long period. It happens whenever. It happens whenever I try to turn down the screen brightness. (I do that by holding fn and pressing End) I do it on a Lenovo Thinkpad t400 with Parabola Gnu/Linux-libre installed with OpenRC, using the base-rc package in the Parabola repos.
What I saw:
i3 is irresponsive to keyboard, but the active window responds to keyboard. I cannot click on anything. I can see i3blocks’ clock ticking away. Caps-lock works. If I switch to tty2 with ctrl-alt-2, and then back to i3 with alt-1, the window bars at the top of the screen disappear, turn black.
What I expected instead: I expect i3 to continue running without making me run killall xinit in tty2 and then startx.
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 7 years ago
- Comments: 18 (8 by maintainers)
Commits related to this issue
- https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/2979 — committed to tnek/dotfiles by tnek 5 years ago
So I kept running into this and found some useful information. I’m on Arch Linux and recently got this problem again. After some digging, I found that the dbus package had been update to not build X11 support into
dbus-launch. In the man page, it says that the--exit-with-sessionflag is deprecated and that it will just try to do--exit-with-x11if X11 support is available. If not, it falls back to the old behavior.It’s this old behavior that makes i3 lock up for me (and it sounds like awesomewm and exwm from reading other threads). I’m not sure what’s going on there, but given that the flag is deprecated, I’m not hopeful that it would be fixed.
As for myself, I was able to fix the issue by recompiling dbus with X11 support and using
--exit-with-x11. However, after talking to the Arch devs, I was told thatdbus-launchis not necessary on Arch as systemd starts a user session. I had to update my.xinitrcto execute scripts in/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/, one of which configures the user session for the X11 session I am starting. Once I did that I had a working dbus user session without usingdbus-launch.I’m not sure what to do outside of Arch, but hopefully this is useful for others.