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I am having a huge trouble with my keyboard and mouse just losing power after my Ubuntu 16.04 desktop has been left idle for an extended period of time. What happens is that the monitor screen is black (since the system naturally turned off the screen after inactivity) and the lights on the keyboard and the mouse are just off. Unplugging both devices, and plugging them back in, brings the light on them for a about 5secs, then the light disappears. I've tried switching multiple USB ports and they all behave the same way. For a sanity check, I also tried plugging in a USB flash drive, and it totally does not light up.

This issue is erratic; there are days when I am able to return back to my machine after a long period of being idle, and the keyboard and mouse are working perfectly, no power being cut off.

This problem also doesn't seem related to the length of time which I leave my PC unattended. For the problem that happened today, I only left my machine unattended for about 2hrs and it cropped up. There are other days when I leave my machine unattended overnight and return the next morning with the keyboard and mouse fully powered up and usable.

Does anyone know if this could be an issue related to the kernel? Do I have to update the kernel?

In the interim, I am just going to try disabling monitor sleep entirely. I hope this can at least solve this. Does anyone know if this is related to a bigger issue in this latest Ubuntu release concerning USB power stability?

Now it seems like the only way out for me is to force shutdown of my system and reboot. This has happened a few times and is really a serious problem because I am soon going to be using my machine for data science applications and I can't have my machine just switch off all the ports whenever it wants to, and force me to shutdown my system and restart it just to regain control over it!

Here are the specs of my system:

Asus z170 deluxe motherboard with built in wifi connection

Intel Core i7 6700k

Tecknet brand USB keyboard with lighted keys

Kensington USB optical mouse

Thank you.

AKKA
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  • Possibly the same issue as bug #1609119. – Gunnar Hjalmarsson Aug 05 '16 at 02:26
  • Thanks @GunnarHjalmarsson for the quick response! It is good to know that a similar issue has been reported. The guy who raised the issue up didn't report it was a problem with his USB peripherals losing power. When this problem first happened to me, I also didn't realize that, its only after a few times its happened that I noticed that its associated with the loss of power to the USB ports. You listed it as coming from lightDM package - so you don't think its a kernel issue? Is there anything I can do to help in this? Its good if it isn't! Hope it gets fixed soon.... – AKKA Aug 05 '16 at 02:45
  • To be honest, stating lightdm as affected package was only a guess from my side (originally it was incorrectly filed as a docs issue). OTOH I know that the lightdm bugs will sooner or later get attention from more experienced folks.. It would be great if you could add your observations to the bug report (i.e. if you think it's the same issue). – Gunnar Hjalmarsson Aug 05 '16 at 03:33
  • Did you try http://askubuntu.com/questions/80638/how-to-disable-auto-power-off-of-usb-devices-like-usb-mouse?rq=1 – Elder Geek Sep 27 '16 at 21:14

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