Display output and keyboard input locks up
Hello, I have a SuSE Linux 7.2 Pro installation with some enhancements -- all latest KDE upgrades and Gnome upgrades, running WindowMaker 0.80 as my window manager. Everything runs great, except I am getting random lockups while doing seemlingly innocent things. The first time that it happened, my system had been running non-stop for about a week. I had VMWare running (not really doing anything at the point of freeze), and I had just rendered a page in Konqueror, and everything on the screen froze except for the mouse. The second time, which was just 2 days later, I was moving an email message in Evolution 1.0 from the inbox to a sub folder. The mouse pointer changed to the "I'm moving something" pointer, and everything stopped responding. Evolution was the only thing running this time, and it wasn't running the first time that this happened. The steps that I took to try and figure out what was going on was to ssh into the box from another machine. So the box wasn't "locked", it was the display and keyboard only (caps / num lock keys were non-functional). The first time, I tried killing the X process. "kill <pid>" didn't do anything - X still showed in the process list. I did "kill -9 <pid>" and then the whole box froze. The second time it happened (2 hours and 18 minutes ago) I was able to kill all processes dealing with the X server (including all of my WindowMaker dock apps), but the screen and keyboard were still frozen solid. I tried to "shutdown -r now" from the other machine, but it didn't seem to do anything but lock up the PC entirely. The /var/log/messages entry at the point of lockup shows 3 lines of "^@^@^@^@" before "Jan 13 13:19:08 lancelot syslogd 1.3-3: restart." Is there something that I can do to figure out what is causing this? Could it be a hardware issue, even though it runs fine for a long time before doing anything funky like this? Thanks for any help and/or advice, -Steven
Hi Steven, I see similar things happening, very random freezes, and did a lot of search to fix it. One new thing I saw recently (on the nvidia mailing list) was to disable AGP 4x (in the BIOS), which seems to solve this problem sometimes. I'm now getting a cleaner startup of X, it recognizes AGP (before it did not really). If the freezes are gone I can tell you in a few days, so far it is just a day since I changed this setting. HTH, Matt On Monday 14 January 2002 03:48, Steven Hatfield wrote:
Hello, I have a SuSE Linux 7.2 Pro installation with some enhancements -- all latest KDE upgrades and Gnome upgrades, running WindowMaker 0.80 as my window manager. Everything runs great, except I am getting random lockups while doing seemlingly innocent things.
The first time that it happened, my system had been running non-stop for about a week. I had VMWare running (not really doing anything at the point of freeze), and I had just rendered a page in Konqueror, and everything on the screen froze except for the mouse.
The second time, which was just 2 days later, I was moving an email message in Evolution 1.0 from the inbox to a sub folder. The mouse pointer changed to the "I'm moving something" pointer, and everything stopped responding. Evolution was the only thing running this time, and it wasn't running the first time that this happened.
The steps that I took to try and figure out what was going on was to ssh into the box from another machine. So the box wasn't "locked", it was the display and keyboard only (caps / num lock keys were non-functional).
The first time, I tried killing the X process. "kill <pid>" didn't do anything - X still showed in the process list. I did "kill -9 <pid>" and then the whole box froze.
The second time it happened (2 hours and 18 minutes ago) I was able to kill all processes dealing with the X server (including all of my WindowMaker dock apps), but the screen and keyboard were still frozen solid. I tried to "shutdown -r now" from the other machine, but it didn't seem to do anything but lock up the PC entirely.
The /var/log/messages entry at the point of lockup shows 3 lines of "^@^@^@^@" before "Jan 13 13:19:08 lancelot syslogd 1.3-3: restart."
Is there something that I can do to figure out what is causing this? Could it be a hardware issue, even though it runs fine for a long time before doing anything funky like this?
Thanks for any help and/or advice, -Steven
participants (2)
-
Matt T. -
Steven Hatfield