How to handle a gnome-shell lock up?

[Mariusz W]

Sooner or later you may experience a Gnome shell lock up. After two weeks of daily use I experienced my first one today: the cursor turned to a hand, and no amount of clicking and pressing Esc would have any effect; Windows key didn't bring Activities in focus either.

If you experience these or similar symptoms you can restart the gnome-shell in order to unlock the Gnome session:

1) pass to a console (press Ctrl+Alt+F2)

2) log in

3) execute: ps -ef | grep gnome-shell in order to find the gnome-shell process id (PID); the output may look something like

thoe      1539  1354  1 **:** ?        **:**:** /usr/bin/gnome-shell
thoe      1632     1 0  **:** ?        00:00:00 /usr/libexec/gnome-shell-calendar-server
thoe      8691  1894  0 **:** pts/2    00:00:00 grep --color=auto gnome-shell

The gnome-shell PID is marked in red.

4) execute: kill -9 <PID>

In the above example it would be: kill -9 1539


Pressing Ctrl+ALt+F1 (or, if that doesn't work -- Ctrl+ALt+F7) should take you back to the Gnome session. You should see the restarted gnome-shell. (You can now return to the console, log out from the console, and return to the Gnome session).

[DBelton]

Good information, Mariusz

I have on occasion found that the gnome shell restarts on the Ctrl-ALT-F7 console instead of the Ctrl-ALT-F1 sometimes. I haven't figured out what causes it to change yet, but just thought I would mention it in case someone didn't get back to it by using Ctrl-Alt-F1, they can try the other.

[Mariusz W]

Originally Posted by DBelton

I have on occasion found that the gnome shell restarts on the Ctrl-ALT-F7 console instead of the Ctrl-ALT-F1 sometimes. I haven't figured out what causes it to change yet, but just thought I would mention it in case someone didn't get back to it by using Ctrl-Alt-F1, they can try the other.

I noticed that too and with several desktop environments, not just GNOME: either Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F7 take you back to the desktop session; I first try Ctrl+Alt+F1, and if that doesn't work, then I try the other one.

I accordingly edited my post. Thank you for the comment.