X or SuSE 8.1 crashing - how to tell - how to fix?
All, I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active. I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding. 1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing? 2) Where should I start looking, to fix this? I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for. There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??). I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way? The system has run for as long as four days without a crash, but I've also had two crashes in one day, more than once, so it averages a complete failure every two days. The sdb and the Unofficial SuSE FAQ did not seem to address this issue. I'm writing this from my office. Last night, at home, I was in the process of writing this message and saying "it seems to occur when I have two X sessions open [Ctrl][F7] and [Ctrl][F8]", but then the system crashed while I was typing... and I had only the one session open. So, I don't know. How would you approach diagnosing this problem? The same computer had 8.0 on it for the previous year, and didn't have any of that kind of crash. It started within 3 days of the new install in late October. YaST did not indicate any hardware problems during install. In fact it was the smoothest installation ever. What's wrong? I consider this a fairly significant problem. /kevin
What video card are you using? This sounds like a video driver problem. I personally have an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. I'm using ATI's official drivers, and I experience problems with X every so often. If you have an NVidia card, there are other posts on this list regarding issues with the drivers and enabling 3D etc... check the archives. Please post which video card you have and what driver in X you're using... running 'sax2' should tell you this information. You can also get this information by going to the 'Control Center' then picking 'YaST2 modules' -> 'Graphics card and monitor'. The first screen will tell you what card X is set up for and other information. Someone should be able to help you better after you've supplied that information. On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 10:56, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for. There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
The system has run for as long as four days without a crash, but I've also had two crashes in one day, more than once, so it averages a complete failure every two days.
The sdb and the Unofficial SuSE FAQ did not seem to address this issue. I'm writing this from my office. Last night, at home, I was in the process of writing this message and saying "it seems to occur when I have two X sessions open [Ctrl][F7] and [Ctrl][F8]", but then the system crashed while I was typing... and I had only the one session open. So, I don't know.
How would you approach diagnosing this problem? The same computer had 8.0 on it for the previous year, and didn't have any of that kind of crash. It started within 3 days of the new install in late October. YaST did not indicate any hardware problems during install. In fact it was the smoothest installation ever. What's wrong? I consider this a fairly significant problem.
/kevin -- Preston Kutzner | IT Manager
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Bohr
Hi Kevin, I had same symptoms end december. I use SuSE 8.0pro and same applications. For me system freezes when i was using OO calc opening MS xls files. I had seen that OO use great amount of memory (~400Mb for one file sized 0.5Mb in xls!!) I decided to test mem with memtest86 and remarked my second mem module was "bad". I test the system with only 256Mb (1 module) and it don't freeze thus i change the defficient mem and now there is no problem ( OO use always a great amount of mem but no hangs) Maybe it's the solution... Franz Le Lundi 13 Janvier 2003 17:56, Kevin McLauchlan a écrit :
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for. There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
The system has run for as long as four days without a crash, but I've also had two crashes in one day, more than once, so it averages a complete failure every two days.
The sdb and the Unofficial SuSE FAQ did not seem to address this issue. I'm writing this from my office. Last night, at home, I was in the process of writing this message and saying "it seems to occur when I have two X sessions open [Ctrl][F7] and [Ctrl][F8]", but then the system crashed while I was typing... and I had only the one session open. So, I don't know.
How would you approach diagnosing this problem? The same computer had 8.0 on it for the previous year, and didn't have any of that kind of crash. It started within 3 days of the new install in late October. YaST did not indicate any hardware problems during install. In fact it was the smoothest installation ever. What's wrong? I consider this a fairly significant problem.
/kevin
-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
Same problem over here with SuSE 8.0, with an ordinary Intel based video card. rgrds, Bart Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for. There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
The system has run for as long as four days without a crash, but I've also had two crashes in one day, more than once, so it averages a complete failure every two days.
The sdb and the Unofficial SuSE FAQ did not seem to address this issue. I'm writing this from my office. Last night, at home, I was in the process of writing this message and saying "it seems to occur when I have two X sessions open [Ctrl][F7] and [Ctrl][F8]", but then the system crashed while I was typing... and I had only the one session open. So, I don't know.
How would you approach diagnosing this problem? The same computer had 8.0 on it for the previous year, and didn't have any of that kind of crash. It started within 3 days of the new install in late October. YaST did not indicate any hardware problems during install. In fact it was the smoothest installation ever. What's wrong? I consider this a fairly significant problem.
/kevin
I had the same crash problems with my Intel chipset when i installed 8.1. I first tried SaX, but SaX test failed with the current configuration, and any configuration else. Then I tried xf86config and now it works fine. If SaX test fails also for you, it may be the same problem. Bart Schelstraete <bschelst@bru-hub.dhl.com> : Same problem over here with SuSE 8.0, with an ordinary Intel based video card. rgrds, Bart Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for. There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
The system has run for as long as four days without a crash, but I've also had two crashes in one day, more than once, so it averages a complete failure every two days.
The sdb and the Unofficial SuSE FAQ did not seem to address this issue. I'm writing this from my office. Last night, at home, I was in the process of writing this message and saying "it seems to occur when I have two X sessions open [Ctrl][F7] and [Ctrl][F8]", but then the system crashed while I was typing... and I had only the one session open. So, I don't know.
How would you approach diagnosing this problem? The same computer had 8.0 on it for the previous year, and didn't have any of that kind of crash. It started within 3 days of the new install in late October. YaST did not indicate any hardware problems during install. In fact it was the smoothest installation ever. What's wrong? I consider this a fairly significant problem.
/kevin
-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
On Tuesday 14 January 2003 02:18, oeren@ykb.com wrote:
I had the same crash problems with my Intel chipset when i installed 8.1. I first tried SaX, but SaX test failed with the current configuration, and any configuration else. Then I tried xf86config and now it works fine. If SaX test fails also for you, it may be the same problem.
If SaX seems happy, on my system, is there then any reason to go with xf86config? Also, are they mutually exclusive? Or do they update most of the same files? /kevin
On Monday 13 January 2003 16:56, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
Do you have facilities to log in remotely? If you can, then the kernel etc. must still be running 'properly' and you can run tools to find out what is going on.
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
You could look in the relevant logs, try (all in /var/logs) faillog, kdm.log, messages, messages-<date>.gz, XFree86.x.y.log{.old} to see if anything seems relevant - consider EXACTLY what you were doing when the crash/freeze occurs. You could run memtest from the boot menu to see if there is a memory error, and fsck all your prtitions (boot from the install CD into rescue for this)
I have been combing through /var/log, but I have not found anything interesting -- mostly because I don't know what I'm looking for.
If you boot from the cd into rescue mode, then the last lines of the logs will be the last ones written. Of course, the cause of the hang could also prevent log writing!
There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
Do you see warnings from the filesystem on the subsequent boot?
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
You can try ctrl-alt-f2 to see if a text console turns up... Dylan -- "Sweet moderation Heart of this nation Desert us not We are between the wars" Billy Bragg
Somebody else asked about video board: It's an ATI Rage 128Pro (from memory, I'm at the office), about 2.5 years old. Worked ok with SuSE 7.3 and 8.0. Responses to your comments interspersed below... On Monday 13 January 2003 14:05, Dylan wrote:
On Monday 13 January 2003 16:56, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
All,
I installed 8.1 from DVD two+ months ago, on my home system. I normally use KDE3, KMail, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Opera or Mozilla... and not much else. I have my screensaver password protected. Most -- but not all -- failures occur while the screensaver is active.
I have had 37 crashes since going to 8.1 (previously I had 8.0, but I did a fresh install with formatting). The symptoms are: display freezes, keyboard and mouse stop responding.
1) How do I decide if it is exclusively X, and not some other aspect of Linux that is crashing?
Do you have facilities to log in remotely? If you can, then the kernel etc. must still be running 'properly' and you can run tools to find out what is going on.
I'll see what I can do with my wife's machine... Should I need to run anything special on MY machine, or is it ready to accept remote terminal logins by default?
2) Where should I start looking, to fix this?
You could look in the relevant logs, try (all in /var/logs) faillog, kdm.log, messages, messages-<date>.gz, XFree86.x.y.log{.old} to see if anything seems relevant - consider EXACTLY what you were doing when the crash/freeze occurs.
I'll re-visit those particular files, thanks.
There's also a good chance that there's nothing to find, because no disk activity takes place after the system hangs (so, probably failures aren't logged??).
Do you see warnings from the filesystem on the subsequent boot?
Yes, because I always have to do a hard reboot with the reset button, so file system is not cleaned up. But I have not recognized anything that suggests a reason for the failure.
I define a "crash" as "It stopped and I can't make it work anymore." When the display is frozen, and there is no response to keyboard and mouse, I press the hardware reset switch. Is there another way?
You can try ctrl-alt-f2 to see if a text console turns up... When I say "no response to keyboard and mouse", I really do mean "no response to keyboard and mouse". :-)
Because I'm not *always* working, and because I have the password-protected screensaver on a 4-minute cycle, *most* of the failures have occurred while the machine was relatively idle. It's possible that timed events may have been running when some failures happened, but mostly, there'd be two or three programs open but not performing any activity... only the screensaver would be actively using CPU cycles. About half the time, a second KDE session (my wife) was also running at idle. However enough crashes have happened with only the one session running, that I doubt it's an issue. There was no complaint from YaST when I installed 8.1, and no problem from SaX2 on the two or three occasions that I've run it. I've run YOU several times, so things should be as up-to-date as SuSE makes them. I'm trying to set up Balsa, in GNOME, so that I can work -- including e-mail -- without invoking any KDE underpinnings (i.e., not using KMail that calls qt and a bunch of other stuff), but now I have to figure out fetchmail and sendmail, since Balsa doesn't appear to do the fetching and sending from my ISP mail account, all by itself as KMail did. If I get that going, and the crashes cease, then I'll have a good indication that there's a K problem. I initially chose KDE3 because it was supposedly more thoroughly integrated by SuSE. /kevin
On Monday 13 January 2003 22:14, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
On Monday 13 January 2003 14:05, Dylan wrote:
Do you have facilities to log in remotely? If you can, then the kernel etc. must still be running 'properly' and you can run tools to find out what is going on.
I'll see what I can do with my wife's machine... Should I need to run anything special on MY machine, or is it ready to accept remote terminal logins by default?
Check that you have sshd installed and running (I think it is by default) then simply ssh <machine IP or host-name> -l<username> You'll have to login as a normal user then su to root. Then you'll be able to look at top etc... Failing that, you simply try to ping the offending box - if it responds then there must be /something/ alive in there! <SNIP>
You can try ctrl-alt-f2 to see if a text console turns up...
When I say "no response to keyboard and mouse", I really do mean "no response to keyboard and mouse". :-)
Fair enough, thought you might say that.
Because I'm not *always* working, and because I have the password-protected screensaver on a 4-minute cycle,
Is there any reason why you can't extend that for a while, or even disable the ss for a few days?
*most* of the failures have occurred while the machine was relatively idle. It's possible that timed events may have been running when some failures happened, but mostly, there'd be two or three programs open but not performing any activity... only the screensaver would be actively using CPU cycles.
Now you mention timed events... Take a look at what cron and at are doing (check the man pages for the config file details.)
About half the time, a second KDE session (my wife) was also running at idle.
This has caused some strange effects here occasionally, but not a hard lockup.
However enough crashes have happened with only the one session running, that I doubt it's an issue.
There was no complaint from YaST when I installed 8.1, and no problem from SaX2 on the two or three occasions that I've run it. I've run YOU several times, so things should be as up-to-date as SuSE makes them.
I'm trying to set up Balsa, in GNOME, so that I can work -- including e-mail -- without invoking any KDE underpinnings (i.e., not using KMail that calls qt and a bunch of other stuff), but now I have to figure out fetchmail and sendmail, since Balsa doesn't appear to do the fetching and sending from my ISP mail account, all by itself as KMail did. If I get that going, and the crashes cease, then I'll have a good indication that there's a K problem.
Indeed, but remember to change the login and display manager to gdm from kdm, or you'll be using KDE 'underpinnings' anyway
I initially chose KDE3 because it was supposedly more thoroughly integrated by SuSE.
It is, but that doesn't necessarily make it a Good Thing...
/kevin
-- "Sweet moderation Heart of this nation Desert us not We are between the wars" Billy Bragg
On Monday 13 January 2003 17:32, Dylan wrote: [...]
Because I'm not *always* working, and because I have the password-protected screensaver on a 4-minute cycle,
Is there any reason why you can't extend that for a while, or even disable the ss for a few days?
Yeah, some long-term houseguests. I don't have a key-lock on the door to my home office, to make sure that the kid keeps his mitts off... [snip about using GNOME instead of KDE]
Indeed, but remember to change the login and display manager to gdm from kdm, or you'll be using KDE 'underpinnings' anyway
Good thing you said that. I started in GNOME the other night, and the system crashed yesterday morning (it was OK when I left for work, but the wife noticed the keyboard lights at noon), so I was about to dismiss KDE as the problem. I'll see about telling X to invoke GDM instead of KDM. Thanks. Funny, in 7.3 and 8.0 -- same machine -- I was able to leave anything running for months without problems. I mean, I could *make* problems by trying to configure stuff, but if I just ran programs or just let the machine sit, it was happy and content and never crashed. /kevin /kevin
participants (6)
-
Bart Schelstraete -
Dylan -
Franz Knuts -
Kevin McLauchlan -
oeren＠ykb.com -
Preston Kutzner