Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1695 mails)

[Ted Markowitz <tjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just purchased a new Dell Inspiron 530 tower system (Intel® Core™2
Quad processor Q6600, 6Gb RAM, 750Gb disk, Intel on-board G33 video
chipset---which I'd rather not be using, but that was what the system
package had in it) to act primarily as a server machine in my home
office. It came with 64-bit Vista installed (of course), and once I
figured out how to partition the all-Vista disk into a much smaller
Vista partition (not as easy as it sounds since the Vista partitioner
won't let you shrink volumes past the point where it keeps some system
files, no matter how hard you try to get rid of them, but that's another
story), I repartitioned the rest of the disk to be Linux friendly.

I then installed openSUSE 11.0 on it (I've done this several times
before on other systems of mine), upgraded with all the latest patches
and updates, and got ready to run with it. Although it seemed to run
OK---for a while anyway---it's frozen up on me at least 3 or 4 times in
the last two days: twice when I wasn't using it actively and another
time as I was typing away in a KDE session. Nothing would respond:
couldn't restart X (Ctrl-Alt-BS twice) and couldn't reboot from the
keyboard (Ctrl-Alt-Del). I needed to do a full power-off/power-on to get
it up and running again.

Looking for some cause, I checked dmesg, /var/log/messages, and
/var/log/Xorg.0.log for hints as to what may be happening. Unfortunately
there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in any of them; no
warning messages, no kernel panic, no nothing. The logs look perfectly
normal up till the point of the freeze and then the booting msgs appear
after I push the power button.

Anyone have any ideas or experiences (good/bad) with a similar
configuration? I have all Dell's in my office, so in principle this one
should work too. The only major differences are the fact that this one
is a Quad-core machine and that it's using the on-board Intel graphics
chipset for video. All my others are single CPU's or Core 2 Duo's, and
the video on those is either ATI or NVidia.

One other piece of evidence: since I need to get this thing up and
running now, I installed the latest Ubuntu 8.04 on another partition to
see if the distro might have anything to do with it. For the past 24
hours or so,it hasn't hicupped yet. Honestly, I'd rather stick with SUSE
on all my systems and can still multi-boot back into it, but I need a
stable system ASAP.

Any pointers or aid would be much appreciated.

TIA,

//ted


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