On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:00, John Bennett wrote:

 Have been running 11.3 x64 KDE since it was released, with all patches,  and must say that generally am very happy with it. But.... Don't know what the prob is, but very intermittently and seemingly randomly, I get an "almost total" lockup - X totally locks, on 1 occasion I did get back to a command prompt, but then seemed to lose keyboard access.... My initial thought is that I have an issue with either Firefox or Thunderbird, which have their data sitting on a vfat partition, and this always wants to check after this happens and a reboot - but are they causing the prob, or a result of..? Anybody else having these issues, or should I start looking at local hardware? (Have run some quick test, but there appear to be no probs)

If you can ssh in from another machine, run top and watch Xorg (someone else here suggested I do this when I had similar issues with my 11.3 install). Is Xorg eating up 100% CPU? The "solution" I've been suggesting to everyone who has encountered this is to bump up to the 2.6.35 kernel from Kernel:Head This is the repository: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/HEAD/openSUSE_11.3/ This has cleared up the issue on all machines I've worked on that have shown this behavior. It's easy to install the kernel, and worth trying it (in my opinion) to see if the updated kernel will clear up this locking behavior. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

John Bennett said the following on 08/15/2010 05:00 AM:

Have been running 11.3 x64 KDE since it was released, with all patches, and must say that generally am very happy with it. But.... Don't know what the prob is, but very intermittently and seemingly randomly, I get an "almost total" lockup - X totally locks, on 1 occasion I did get back to a command prompt, but then seemed to lose keyboard access.... My initial thought is that I have an issue with either Firefox or Thunderbird, which have their data sitting on a vfat partition, and this always wants to check after this happens and a reboot - but are they causing the prob, or a result of..? Anybody else having these issues, or should I start looking at local hardware? (Have run some quick test, but there appear to be no probs) Thanks,

Yes, I had these problems with 11.2 They seemed to be triggered by Firefox and had something to do with XSYNC. Its back there in the archives. The fix was an extra few lines in xorg.conf - also documented on this list and in the archives. The root problem was an interaction with the X server and the view driver. I'm using rather old ATI hardware. The suggestion of using ssh and top is a good one. I did that and saw the X server at 100% of one cpu and 98% of the other. OMG! Disabling FF extensions didn't help and I was worried about FF, but FF was just the trigger not the cause. -- A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org