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I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on a Toshiba C50D-A-133 laptop. After installation I opened a terminal, and ran sudo apt-get install with some packages. I remember PlayOnLinux , GIMP, etc.

While the packages were being installed I started Empathy to enter the access data from my jabber account. In the shell window I saw that the Windows fonts were unpacking. Empathy fades to gray, and after 1 or 2 seconds it goes back to normal, and I could enter the jabber account information. At the shell windows apt-get was unpacking the next packages. Then after this a window with an update notification appears. I chose there preferences, and I unmarked the checkboxes there. After closing, the windows turned gray too for about 1 or 2 seconds, then the notification "no updates needed" appears.

I think that the windows became unresponsive because the system was busy. Is this correct or could something be damaged or wrong with my system? No program crashed or was aborted, only turned gray for a second, and then ran normally.

karel
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Andre Nitschke
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  • What are your system specs and which flavor are you running? – s3lph Oct 28 '14 at 22:39
  • AMD Essentials E1-2100 Accelerated Prozessor , and i ised ubuntu 14.04 64bit with Unity – Andre Nitschke Oct 28 '14 at 22:43
  • Open Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers -> Select fglrx (even if you don't use a Radeon video card; fglrx is needed to properly overclock an AMD APU) Then reboot and see whether the problem persists – s3lph Oct 28 '14 at 22:45
  • is this a driver problem? i think the system was to busy and unity see the window gives no response. so it was fading to grey. after the short time, the program (here empathy) gives a response to unity and it get normal color. look here, this happens: http://askubuntu.com/questions/128921/how-do-i-turn-off-the-feature-where-a-window-grays-out-when-its-thinking – Andre Nitschke Oct 28 '14 at 22:49
  • My programs also hang like this sometimes, but nothing out of the ordinary. Like karel mentioned in answer bellow, your cpu is kind of old and ram probably isn't enough. What you could do is install more ram, or a lighter desktop environment like lxde or xfce. Plus limit some startup programs and change priority for some processes in task manager. Let meknow if you want more detailed info and I'll post it as an answer bellow – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Oct 29 '14 at 03:19
  • @Xieerqi The Toshiba Satellite C50D-A-133 is a recent model laptop with 4GB of RAM, so it can comfortably run the Ubuntu with the default Unity desktop environment. The 28 nm AMD E1-2100 1.0GHz processor operates at lower voltages than previous AMD Bobcat processors giving the laptop a longer battery life. – karel Oct 29 '14 at 03:26
  • Ah, ok. I assumed because it's 1GHz its a bit outdated. Still, the point I was trying to get across is that you could find a compromise between your cpu and the graphics – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Oct 29 '14 at 03:39
  • If nothing is damaged, i cal live with this. – Andre Nitschke Oct 30 '14 at 06:49

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The Toshiba C50D-A-133 laptop has an AMD E1-210 which only runs at 1GHz, not that great by modern standards. It is normal with a laptop with a slow CPU like that for the Ubuntu Software Center window to dim to gray when there are multiple packages queued up waiting to be installed. An application window turns gray when the processor is busy and the application is waiting for the processor to respond, and then after some time has elapsed, it times out and the window dims. A gray window caused by a timeout that dims and then goes back to normal won't cause any damage to your system.

There is something that you can do about it. If you find the gray-looking window in the Ubuntu software Center annoying, you can install multiple packages from the terminal using a single command of the form:

sudo apt-get install first-package second-package other-packages

...where you substitute the package names of the packages in the command with a space between each package name. If you install packages from the terminal, the terminal window will never turn gray and you will not have any problem with the window freezing, forcing you to force quit the Ubuntu Software Center and then try to install some packages that were at the end of the queue again. This is sometimes necessary, because when you force quit the Ubuntu Software Center the Ubuntu Software Center sometimes removes packages that have not started being installed from the queue, so you have to search for those packages and click the Install button to install them a second time.

Once you get past the obstacle of updating your system and installing packages, you should expect to have fewer problems with applications windows dimming to a gray screen or not responding. On a laptop with a slow processor like yours, you may find it necessary when using GIMP to save your image in the middle of the job, close GIMP and then reopen the saved image in GIMP and continue the image editing from where you left off. Another tip for preventing application windows from getting gray screens is to avoid multitasking other applications when running a processor-intensive task.

karel
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  • Thanks for the answer. The packages i installed the way you describes. The first "dim to grey" from empathy was when apt-get installed playonlinux (so far i could see he load and unpack the windows corefonts). During the installation of the packages i started empathy. The secound time it was the software preferences (i hope this english word is correct, i am german and here it is called software-einstellungen) that dim shortly away. I think the cpu is realy to weak for some operations. When there is no damage to the system i will not care anymore. That was all i want to know. – Andre Nitschke Oct 29 '14 at 07:12
  • I have the same problem with an AMD dual core 2.9 Mhz 4GB ram. I'm trying the flgrx fix now. (not flgrx updates?) – Jason Oct 03 '15 at 03:55
  • @JaredRosenberg If you don't know whether to install fglrx or fglrx-updates, open the terminal and check the results of the command: ubuntu-drivers devices – karel Oct 03 '15 at 04:04
  • I got these results (shortened) driver : xserver-xorg-video-ati - distro free builtin recommended driver : fglrx-updates - distro non-free driver : fglrx - distro non-free Still having the problem. – Jason Oct 04 '15 at 16:40
  • The recommended driver is fglrx-updates. – karel Oct 04 '15 at 17:00
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This may have more to do with available RAM than with CPU. I get this problem frequently in virtual machines which have lots of CPU (I may not be running much of anything else) but sharply constrained RAM allotment. I agree with the prior observations, however, that multitasking a lot of processes at once, especially when one or more of them requires a lot of resources, is the main trigger of this grey-out behavior. It will cause a lot of virtual memory swapping. (That said, if you have a slow CPU that might also cause this problem, even if low RAM does, as well.)

S. McCandlish
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