Ubuntu: Crash and Burn

Ubuntu gave me a birthday present. Yes, on my 73rd birthday, Ubuntu offered up a complete meltdown of my laptop's functionality: no mouse, no trackpad, no keyboard. So much for the 20.04 stable release! I couldn't be bothered trouble-shooting and simply reinstalled the operating system. Everything works fine again now, although I have to reinstall Astrolog and Calibre for starters.

It's not the first time this has happened. I made a post titled Mouse, Trackpad and Keyboard Freeze in Ubuntu on 15th March 2022. I'd forgotten that I'd solved the problem back then by holding down the option key while rebooting. At that time, I blamed the problem on keyboard remapping software Kinto that I hadn't properly uninstalled. In hindsight, that may not have been the cause at all. I fully removed what I thought was the offending software with a program called Stacer. 

I've tried to reinstall this Stacer and apparently succeeded but it doesn't launch. I installed it before using Flatpak but doesn't install either. So frustrations get heaped on top of frustrations. I don't have the patience to deal with these problems anymore. I just want an operating system that works and that's what I had by and large with Mac OS. 

This "crash and burn" of Ubuntu is disappointing and reminds that I need to store any important files online for easy retrieval later. My Astrolog charts are gone but I had already set up the Airtable database containing the original data, so the charts can be recreated. Likewise I may have lost a few books from my Calibre library. I'm not sure what their titles were but, if I remember them, they can be added again. The incident has motivated me to get organised.

I thought that I may as well install the latest version of Ubuntu now that I'm up and running again. My reason for sticking with the long term stable release was ... its stability! So I set about downloading the latest release, version 21.04 released in April of 2021. Not so fast.

Of course, there's no network problem but hey, who cares? I considered reinstalling Mac OS just to sidestep all this nonsense and actually set about doing it, following instructions at this site:

I got to the point where installation of Big Sur was about to start but a connection with the Apple server couldn't be established and so the installation was aborted. It's recommended that an Ethernet connection be used for downloading and so I should try this before giving up altogether ... but not tonight. I don't want to spend the remainder of my birthday dealing with technological issues.

Before closing, I must point out that my latest annoyance is the brightness of the screen now varying. This is a minor problem but nonetheless annoying. The operating system may be the cause or it may simply be  the result of old age. My poor old battery registers 46% when fully charged. No matter. Life goes on.

Mouse, Trackpad and Keyboard Freeze in Ubuntu

Life with Ubuntu is never dull and predictable. Last night I discovered that my mouse, trackpad and keyboard on my Mac laptop had all frozen. This had happened a few days earlier and the problem had been resolved with a reboot. However, as I was tired, I simply shut it down and planned to restart it in the morning.

That proved to be overly optimistic. After the morning reboot, the problem persisted. I tried a couple more times. I removed the USB receiver for my Logitech mouse and tried again. Still no change. I searched online but most help involved using the terminal and I had no keyboard. It was looking like a reinstallation would be necessary but, if that were needed, I would not be installing Ubuntu again but another version of Linux.

However, I decided to reboot while pressing the option key which brings up the boot menu. When I did this the mouse, trackpad and keyboard all worked. There was only the Ubuntu on the hard drive to boot from so I chose this and hoped for the best. With the OS loaded, everything worked and life was back to normal.

It was certainly odd that all input options failed at the same time and I felt that I should investigate further to try to get to the bottom of the problem as it is likely to recur. I remembered that I had been initially frustrated that Command+C for copy and Command+V for paste no longer worked. Instead Control+C and Control+V had to be used instead. 

With this problem in mind I installed an app called Kinto that supposedly remapped the keyboard. However, I never got the program to work properly but the icon continued to display on my list of apps. It was only after installing Stacer that I found that Kinto was loading at Startup. I was then able to delete it and I suspect that this was the source of the problem. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

I came across Stacer in a 2017 post titled The 10 Easiest Ways to Keep Ubuntu System Clean that has quite a few good tips including:

• $ sudo apt-get autoremove (to remove unnecessary packages and dependencies)
• $ sudo rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/* (the number of thumbnails can build up over time)
• $ sudo apt-get clean (remove all cache files)