USB device lockups

I'm having no luck with USB devices, which include my keyboard, mouse and wifi dongle. I am most concerned about my keyboard and mouse because when they lock up, I have no choice but to hard boot the computer with the power button. At first it only happened once in a while, but it's getting worse and worse. Now every 15 minutes or so, the keyboard and mouse "die" and I have to hard boot. Re the wifi, the internal wifi card works (at a much slower speed) and I've been trying unsuccessfully to install the dongle's driver, possibly because it's not being detected reliably.

My keyboard and mouse are Logitech and they connect with a "unifying receiver" dongle. I looked on the Logitech website, only some of their devices are compatible with linux. My mouse is on the compatibility list, keyboard is not. There are no drivers available to download for either device. When I check with lusb I see that the Logitech dongle is detected. So is the wifi dongle when it's connected.

I have a second keyboard which connects via USB cable. It's a plain keyboard with none of the "bells and whistles" that the Logitech one has. It's useless under Zorin, its light just flickers on briefly once in a while, other than that it's not detected at all. There is no driver for it, all the manufacturer says is "plug it in when the computer is shut down and it will be detected when the computer boots".

At first I thought the problem could be Firefox, as it does its' usual (even under Windows) and crashes continually, which is why I stopped using it in Windows. So, I downloaded Opera, but it's doing the same thing. I've tried closing everything except Text Editor and typing for a while, it still freezes after a while.

I'd appreciate some advice as to how to troubleshoot or fix this issue. Stuff like software that would give some info, or terminal commands would be great! I should mention that Zorin OS 9 is on a partition on my hard drive with (what's left of) Windows on the other, and it's a 64 bit system.

that's wierd and definitely depressing! Since you are naming all sorts of different USB devices it must be a problem with USB. Either it is a problem with your operating system talking to the USB controller or else your USB controller is going toast.

A few diagnostic questions: Have you noticed different behavior when plugging devices into different ports or not? maybe one particular port is bad.
What is the make and model of your computer (or motherboard if your motherboard is after-market or computer is built)? Maybe you need extra drivers/utilities
Could you reinstall your operating system to see if it solves your problem?

Hope this helps

Logitech is a big no-no for GNU/Linux users as it is generally not supported (keyboards) - I purchased a Maxtek Gaming keyboard that I am writing on now that cost me £9.99 from a supermarket, with gaming mouse for same price and both work with Zorini - only one or two 'launch' assigned buttons don't work with their Windows assignment (mail button launches browser). But other than that it is great.

I suggest you take a look here for hardware issues:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5440

With regards your wireless dongle:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5449

It's too bad I can't afford another USB keyboard right now, but even the bare bones non-Logitech one I have doesn't work at all. I already tried swapping the devices around between ports. I'm starting to wonder if this could be a memory issue rather than a hardware issue. I guess I will find out soon enough. My laptop has 8 gb of RAM and plenty of hard drive space.

I finally managed to get my USB 5g wireless dongle driver installed and working. So if it starts quitting at the same time as the keyboard and mouse, I'll have an idea. I notice now that the USB devices stop working right after the program I'm using (usually Opera browser) hangs. They also konk out when the laptop wakes up from a few minutes of sleep mode.

OK, just check in your BIOS settings that there are no USB powersaving settings - in the past on other distributions that would not pick up wireless keyboards I have connected a PS/2 keyboard during install then put the wireless one back in - but as I said, Logitech support for GNU/Linux is virtually zilch! I am currently using a very cheap keyboard and gaming mouse (wired USB) with no major issues. I cannot comment on wireless keyboards but PS/2 keyboards should work pretty much straight away.

Swarfendor437 wrote:OK, just check in your BIOS settings that there are no USB powersaving settings - in the past on other distributions that would not pick up wireless keyboards I have connected a PS/2 keyboard during install then put the wireless one back in - but as I said, Logitech support for GNU/Linux is virtually zilch! I am currently using a very cheap keyboard and gaming mouse (wired USB) with no major issues. I cannot comment on wireless keyboards but PS/2 keyboards should work pretty much straight away.

OK I checked in my BIOS settings but there was nothing about USB power saving. The only thing I found is that legacy operating system support is enabled, in the boot menu. I left that as is for now, as I'm not sure if Linux falls under "legacy". I believe it still boots using UEFI as well.

I have checked the USB devices listing (lsusb) and it detects both the keyboard and mouse as Logitech with the correct model numbers. It also detects my USB wireless dongle correctly. I've only had one glitch with the dongle, after a reboot it wasn't detected and I had to boot again.

I'm starting to think this is a memory or OS stability issue. The system crashes if I have more than two windows open or more than 4 browser tabs. It also crashes if I open a pdf file in the browser. It sometimes crashes when waking from sleep mode. First the mouse movement starts to stutter, then the screen goes dull and everything freezes. Sometimes the freeze happens first, then the mouse acts up. I ran the memtest which is listed as a Zorin boot option, but after 2 hours it found no errors.

System info:
1 TB HDD, Zorin is on a 450 GB partition, the other partition is Windows files (it can't boot to Windows because Windows was fried, hence the Zorin).
8 GB RAM
64 bit
Quad core processor (I forget the model but I think it's AMD)
Computer model: HP Pavilion TS-15 Notebook

Right now I'm considering backup up my files to DVD, wiping the entire hard drive and installing Zorin on its own. I have it on DVD anyway.

Well in terms of Logitech, like I have said here or elsewhere, sadly, they don't support GNU/Linux generally. I have had a trust wireless keyboard working but seem to remember I had to put an old fashioned keyboard whilst installing on a different machine to this one. I'm stuck for answers friend.

I use Logitech MK270r KB/Mouse with unifying receiver on several hardware platforms with Zorin OS 11 (OS 9 works also) including a laptop and the only issue I have is the mouse speed is not adjustable in the system settings by default (see here for work around viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11776 ). Some Linux distro's don't have this issue and I am able to make mouse speed changes.

All the keys on my MK270r work including the multi media keys, volume up, down, mute, sleep, browser, calc etc. Including waking from sleep by moving the mouse or pressing a keyboard key.
Also when installing Zorin the KB/mouse works just fine.

Just a thought about the installation of you Zorin OS, maybe its worth a try to run from the live USB or DVD for a period of time to test and see if that causes the same issue on your hardware.


Also as this seems to be on a laptop what happens if you don't connect any USB KB/mouse? Does it still lock up?

One last thing, is line of sight to the dongle, my main PC has the dongle at the rear, no line of sight but works fine, but I have another PC and need to mount the USB dongle up high on the monitor as something was interfering with it, strange but true...Oh and the batteries are fresh also are they?

MBMz10 wrote:I use Logitech MK270r KB/Mouse with unifying receiver on several hardware platforms with Zorin OS 11 (OS 9 works also) including a laptop and the only issue I have is the mouse speed is not adjustable in the system settings by default (see here for work around viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11776 ). Some Linux distro's don't have this issue and I am able to make mouse speed changes.

All the keys on my MK270r work including the multi media keys, volume up, down, mute, sleep, browser, calc etc. Including waking from sleep by moving the mouse or pressing a keyboard key.
Also when installing Zorin the KB/mouse works just fine.

Just a thought about the installation of you Zorin OS, maybe its worth a try to run from the live USB or DVD for a period of time to test and see if that causes the same issue on your hardware.


Also as this seems to be on a laptop what happens if you don't connect any USB KB/mouse? Does it still lock up?

One last thing, is line of sight to the dongle, my main PC has the dongle at the rear, no line of sight but works fine, but I have another PC and need to mount the USB dongle up high on the monitor as something was interfering with it, strange but true...Oh and the batteries are fresh also are they?

Sorry about the late reply, I didn't enable notifications when a reply is posted, I'm used to boards doing that by default (it's fixed now).

I've come to the conclusion that this is a memory leak with the OS and not caused by the USB devices. I booted up, logged in and then just left the laptop sitting without using the USB devices. Invariably it hangs just from being left alone for 5 min. What hangs is whatever software is running. If I don't open anything it just hangs anyway. The worst offender is any browser. I've now tried Opera, Chrome and Firefox. Firefox is the worst, but then again it does the same in Windows as well.

Re using the laptop keyboard and touchpad - my laptop keyboard and touchpad just plain suck. I opened the laptop and disconnected them not long after I got this laptop. Typing on the laptop stuff is impossible, you can't type without the cursor jumping all over the screen because the touchpad is activated. In Windows it was impossible to disable them, the system would just re-enable them. So I had to disconnect the cables inside.

I'm going to do a clean reinstall when I get around to it. That should fix it. If not, I'm off to find another distro.

So does it 'hang' under Windows as well? Or is this just Zorin? What about using a 'live USB/DVD' session of another Distro? Before you try installing one that is.
Maybe it doesn't like having the keyboard disconnected (hardware)?
Have you tried reseating the RAM? Just clutching at straws here really.

MBMz10 wrote:So does it 'hang' under Windows as well? Or is this just Zorin? What about using a 'live USB/DVD' session of another Distro? Before you try installing one that is.
Maybe it doesn't like having the keyboard disconnected (hardware)?
Have you tried reseating the RAM? Just clutching at straws here really.

- very few hangs under Windows 8
- keyboard was disconnected over 2 years ago, no difference
- not reseating RAM because I'm convinced it's not the RAM and this laptop is hard to crack open (I already cracked the corner once)

Now it's no longer recognizing my 5G USB wifi dongle. I have reinstalled the driver several times. Rebooting only helps sometimes, other times I have to go back to using the internal slower wireless card until Zorin decides to recognize the dongle again.

I will try running it from the DVD but will have to look up how to do it first. The DVD I made the last time was from an ISO image and I've never been able to get the system to boot to it - when I tried it just installed the OS on my HDD. Yes my BIOS boot order is set to CD/DVD first.