Jan 02 2009

Mysteriously Hanging Ubuntu

Published by tim at 5:55 pm under coding

My Asus EEE 1000h had this really irritating but intermittent bug — it would hang occasionally when I was using it. The keyboard was dead, but a) mouse clicks would still work, and b) I could Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X or Ctrl-Alt-Fn to go to a terminal. So, it wasn’t an absolute showstopper, but it was definitely something that could really ruin your flow; you’d have to hope everything was saved, restart X, reload everything, so on and so forth.

I googled for this to no avail, but finally, finally, while researching something else, managed to find out what it was. It turns out that I was accidentally activating SCIM (the input method editor for other languages) with Ctrl-Space or Alt-Space. This was despite the fact that I had SCIM specifically disabled in System -> Administration -> Language Support. Apparently, some versions of Hardy screwed up the SCIM settings.

So, the magic command for anyone googling this:

for conf in ja_JP ko_KR zh_CN zh_HK zh_SG zh_TW all_ALL; do if LC_ALL=C update-alternatives –display xinput-${conf} | grep -q ’status is manual’ && LC_ALL=C update-alternatives –display xinput-${conf} | grep -q ‘currently points to .*scim-bridge’; then update-alternatives –auto xinput-${conf}; fi; done

More details: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/scim/+bug/199030

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