How To Fix A System Freeze In Kali Linux

A system freeze is a common problem in most operating systems. We all experience it along the way and we sometimes do know what caused it and even how to solve it e.g. when i run so many resource draining processes or applications on my system than it can handle.

There may occur a system freeze that causes a window or an application to freeze while it was still running. Many will have observed this commonly in Microsoft Windows where an application tells you "Not Responding". In Windows you can either decide to wait for it to respond - can take forever sometimes - or you decide to open the task manager and forcibly make its processes to end by clicking on the End Task button.

In Linux, if such a similar condition (a frozen windows/application) were to occur - very rare i must say - just open another terminal and on type and execute the following command:

        xkill

The cursor changes from the normal pointer to a 2-bordered plus sign. Click on the frozen windows to stop all its processes. There, we killed it! Problemo solved!

However, there's another unique system freeze which occurs during the first few seconds after login into your system. For a few seconds, only your mouse can move and everything else is frozen. Nothing you click on responds back the way it should, but then after that freeze period, all the desperate and frustrating clicks you had made begin responding all at once.

You may find you clicked on a file like say 7 times and soon after 7 windows of that one file pop up.

The problem is usually within the indexing system built into gnome shell, which is responsible for indexing files for faster access. But then the reverse is usually happening in this case. File access slows down.
 

The processes run by the indexing system are the tracker-miner and tracker-store processes. You can view them on the terminal by executing the command:

        htop

tracker-miner and tracker-store processes

The high CPU usage from processes, tracker-miner and tracker-store makes system freeze.
 

Solution

First we disable the indexing of folders. We do this by killing/stopping all processes that tracker runs i.e. tracker-store and tracker-miner. Execute the following command to do that:

        tracker daemon -k

Stopping all tracker processes

Then we delete any existing tracker logs so that they won't be used again even after the system reboots. We'll do this by killing all Tracker processes and remove all databases ever created. Execute the command:

        tracker reset -r

Killing All Tracker Processes and Removing Databases

Our Last procedure is to edit the startup files. Using your preferred text-editor, we start with the file:

/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
 

In that file, change the line X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true, from X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true to X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false

change X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Same way, open the file /etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop in your preferred text-editor and do the same changes as in the other file above, find the line that reads: X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true and change it from true to false.
 

All along, just to explain what we have been doing by changing those lines to "false", we have been disabling the tracker system from ever running again during startup so that it doesn't initialize the tracker-miner and tracker-store processes into running and eventually resulting in a system freeze.
 

That solves the problem and you may now enjoy your Kali Linux without that momentary system freeze after every login into your account.