[mythtv-users] Frontend locking up and unable to kill it.

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 4 Jul 2019 08:01:48 -0700, you wrote:

>> Here is what I did:
>top (to find the PID)
>sudo kill 1555
>top (still running)
>sudo kill 1555
>top (still running)
>sudo kill -9 1555
>ps aux | grep mythfrontend (still running)
>sudo killall  mythfrontend.re
>ps aux | grep mythfrontend (still running)
>I believe it was at this point I went downstairs and found the popup asking
>if I really wanted to kill the program but with no cursor I was unable to
>randomly land on the "Yes" area and it did not respond to a "Y" from the
>keyboard. The UI was still interactive and I did a right click on the
>mythfrontend tack on the taskbar and said close. The computer was still
>acting normally at this time except no cursor. I then went back upstairs to
>my remote session.
>sudo shutdown now -r
>Then I went downstairs to the computer and pressed the power button, which
>normally does a graceful shutdown. Nothing happened so then I held the
>power button down and the computer turned off.
>
>So as you can see, I did kill PID twice.

OK, so it is not the double kill problem.

If you need to find the cursor, you can do Ctrl-Alt-T to open a
terminal window and the cursor will show up when it is over that
window.  So you move the window until it is lined up above the thing
you want to click, and then move the cursor straight down off that
window until you think you are in the right place and click.  With
only one degree of freedom, it usually does not take too many tries to
hit the right location.

Another thing worth trying is to shut down and restart X - if
mythfrontend is locked up waiting for something in X, that should
unlock it.  If you are running lightdm as the display manager, then
you can do that with:

sudo systemctl restart lightdm

I do not know if that works with gdm, as I have had to switch to
lightdm on my 18.04 systems in order to get around a gdm problem that
makes x11vnc not work.  It is easy to switch from gdm to lightdm -
just install the lightdm package and reboot.

It is also a good idea to have a terminal window open in the
background anyway, as with some of the mythfrontend problems, it does
a broadcast crash message (usually an "Assert failed" message) that
gets displayed on all open terminals.

>I was under the impression that Ubuntu 18.04 would break my LIRC code and
>become another project to get the system working again. I ran Mythbuntu
>8.04 until just this year and never had the problems I have had with the
>latest install. I thought I had it all fixed but then these two lock ups
>happened. Very frustrating.

Yes, the latest mythfrontend does have a couple of ways of crashing.
But I have not seen it lock up as you are getting.  It also has lots
of nice new things too, and more coming.

It was the change to kernel drivers and devinput in 14.04? 16.04? that
really broke LIRC setups, but you will have already met that.  So yes,
the LIRC code as installed by the 18.04 package is badly broken, but
you just need to run this script from my web server to fix that:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-18.04-install.sh

I spent a fair few hours working out how to fix LIRC, but now that I
have, it works properly as normal and you should not need much effort
to get it going.  You just need to run the lirc-setup program and
adjust a couple of names in your LIRC config files and it should all
work, if you have a remote such as an MCE or Hauppauge that uses the
devinput driver.

I do not think you have said what version of MythTV you are running -
is it v30+fixes?

>Allen