No input in GDM/Gnome after recent update

jrittenh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 92

I recently did a fairly large world update, along with installing a few new packages. Everything appeared to work fine until reboot. I no longer have any GUI interaction inside Gnome-based environments (GDM/Gnome in particular, but I tried installing Cinnamon, which has the same problem). in GDM, I can see a mouse cursor and move it around, but it won't click on anything, and nothing responds to keyboard input. I can Ctrl+Alt+F1 to a console, though. If I run a session via startx to boot straight into Gnome (3.6), I again can move a cursor around, and now I can move to the top-left corner to interact with the GUI, but as soon as the Apps screen (or whatever it's called) opens, I can't get out of it. No clicking, no keyboard, etc. I don't think I have keyboard at any point during this process, but I can't remember at the moment. Cinnamon has no interaction, just a cursor I can move.

A very basic X Window System works fine. Fluxbox works fine. I haven't gone so far as to install KDE, but I have quite a few QT libraries on my system already, so I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be to try that...although I'd rather not mess with that if possible.

I've included a list of all packages installed since my last "known good" config, emerge --info, and Xorg.0.log below. I'm not sure what other logs might be useful for troubleshooting, but I can add others if needed. Thanks in advance for any help!

EDIT: Xorg.0.log got cut off, so I moved it to pastebin. Link both above and below.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2013 5:52 pm Post subject:

Just trying to get more information as I have no clue... Are you happening to run some sort of remote desktop function? Can it be disabled?
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jrittenh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 92

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:05 pm Post subject:

Yeah, it indeed is complicated. Having a misconfigured or broken remote desktop function could be eating your clicks and typing and running another environment could simply not start these broken apps, hence it working. The usual suspects that would cause something like this to happen (but usually mouse movement won't work) doesn't apply here - that usual suspect would have been evdev needing update. You should carefully check the processes running when clicks/keyboard stops working and see if any remote desktop process comes up.

Also see if you're somehow running Xorg twice, if something is somehow reading your keyboard input along with X11... Not likely but it could explain the behavior.

Since apparently you have a fairly beefy cpu, and if you have time/patience for reconfiguring apps, you could try emerge -e world to rebuild everything to see what it does.
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

MrZammler · Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2013 12:25 pm Post subject:

I had the same problem a couple of months ago, while on Gnome 3.6

Turned out that during a world emerge, it compiled in something from the gnome overlay which I had at that point. I'm sorry I can't remember the package ATM, it was a library something, having to do with input IIRC.

jrittenh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 92

jrittenh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 92

Another symptom that I'm realizing is likely related...ever since the update, vim doesn't like the arrow keys. Instead of navigation in normal/command mode, I get control characters (it turns on Insert mode and types A/B/C/D depending on which direction I push, Page Up/Down capitalizes individual letters and then types an <Esc>). I've added hard remaps to my .vimrc file (I've tried both nnoremap ^[OA <Up> and nnoremap ^[OA k) with no success. Strangely, root doesn't have the same issue. I'm wondering if root would be able to use gnome, now.

Could this be a profile issue somehow? What would corrupt vim input both locally on the console and in a GUI and also remote via ssh?

I'm around Package 175 of 1600 in my emerge -e world...I'm less and less confident that will fix it, so maybe I can track it down another way.

jrittenh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 92

Well, emerge -e world didn't fix it.

I guess next step is to start poking at apps until I can find one that might have messed with input somehow.

Here's what's running when gdm is started, after a fresh reboot:

ChrisJumper · Advocate Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2390 Location: Germany

Its an issue of gnome 3.X and your update. You need a "proper" update. I don't know what it its.. and where you have a bad constellation. If you already migrate to systemd use it. If not, try to mask