Grub freezes after upgrade to 12.10

[oldfred]

I had a wireless mouse and keyboard for my desktop and it never seemed to work. So I use a USB wired mouse. But I have to have USB on in BIOS settings for mouse & keyboard or on grub menu keyboard does not work, but ps/2 port does.

But I have a newer Logitech wireless (USB) mouse on my laptop and that works without issue. Even half way booted I can realize I forgot to plug it in and then it works.

[Windoze Refugee]

Had no luck getting my ps2 switcher to play ball, but still using the USB mouse.
Right after I changed the drviers, it suddenly all started working really well - much faster, no freezes, and like i said, even the sound devices appeared back in controller.
Now the weird thing is that where it was all working great yesterday, now Im geting intermittent mouse freezes again.
And I have no clue what it could be this time.
Any ideas?

[oldfred]

I have had mouse issues with bad cable, or then new mouse was only solution.
Also sometimes my mouse pad gets too shiny and mouse seems to skip.
If software then you want to go to terminal and run top and see if some process is consuming all the cpu or RAM.

[Windoze Refugee]

I've checked all the cable and they seem OK .
And now, in addition to the returned mouse freezing, the soudn devies have all vanished again. Is it possible the old driver has reinstalled itself? How would I check what version is currently installed? Can I prevent auto updates?

[oldfred]

I think this says I am running nVidia and a list of drivers that work with my card.

fred@fred-Precise:~$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation G94 [GeForce 9600 GT] [10de:0622] (rev a1)
Subsystem: ZOTAC International (MCO) Ltd. Device [19da:1043]
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
Kernel modules: nvidia_319_updates, nouveau, nvidiafb

cat /sys/module/nvidia/version
nvidia-settings --vv

Version & settings need to be the same version of nVidia or you will have issues.

Have you gone into nVidia settings from your menu. I use fallback so I have the old menu system and it is applications, system tools, administration, nvidia X server settings.

[Windoze Refugee]

Hi Fred,
So with the continuing mouse freeze and soething hogging all the processing power I ran Clam TK antivirus. It turned up 100 finds of malware including trojans. I selected 'quarantine" and it immediatley began running much better.
However today (ie after turning it off and rebooting this morning) I have no desktop icons and no navigation bar. I seem to have 'quarantined' something important but I dot know what or how to fix it. The desktop is there but there's nothing on it. Any idea what I can do to fix it?
Cheers WR

[oldfred]

Virus programs often find virus where none exist.
And in Linux anything in use that you uninstall is not released until you stop using it. You can even delete the kernel you use to boot and system runs until you reboot and then kernel is gone.

I do not knows details of what you installed or which of those may be what is missing.

If it is something with dependencies this may fix it or else you may have to in effect reinstall entire desktop. This is what I suggest after a chroot to repair system. Either every command needs sudo or you can use the sudo -i command to put you in administrative mode. Do not run other commands from that terminal as you will still be root and can of course do things you maybe should not. # are comments, do not copy or type the comments.

#Commands once in chroot:
#if not chroot use: sudo -i
#houseclean
apt-get autoclean # only removes files that cannot be downloaded anymore (obsolete)
apt-get clean
#refresh
apt-get update #resync package index
apt-get upgrade #newest versions of all packages, update must be run first
#would upgrade you to the latest kernel in the repositories
#dist-upgrade is also able to remove existing packages if required
apt-get dist-upgrade
# fix Broken packages -f
apt-get -f install
dpkg --configure -a


# reinstall desktop
apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop
apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

If you have changed any settings or customized it at all, be sure to back up before hand. The reinstall may reset some or all settings, so backups always good to have.

[Windoze Refugee]

Hi Fred. OK - I did as you said and got gnome running again, thanks.
However the intermittent mouse freeze is back worse than ever, and now I cant use any sound devices unless I first change the nvidia drivers! - i.e all devices in sound control are missing until the video driver is changed. It doesn't seem to much matter which driver is swapped to or from, just as long as a change is made, then the sound devices magically appear again. The intermittent mouse freeze, along with regular 'stalls' in all other packages, continue. I'm baffled. And sorely regretting 'upgrading' from 12.04

[oldfred]

When mouse freezes can you use terminal and run top? And then does it show some process using 100% of system?

i have not looked at this file for years, and I thought they were obsoleting it. But it may have your sound settings also and resetting video may change sound settings as both may be configured by this file.
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
May be best to post new thread with sound in title, as those who may know more about that type of issue will not look at a thread on grub.
If I installed a new driver for sound in my XP, it would stop working. I then learned I had to unplug & replug in speakers as sound card sensed plug-in to activate speakers and they did not work until you did that.