8.04 Hanging at System Startup

**sweetpea24** · February 1st, 2010

Edit: I've traced the problem back to scim (smart common input platform). Please see next post.

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04. This is not a fresh install. It was working fine until only a few weeks ago. Recently, the system has been having problems starting. After I log in via gdm the system starts to hang until I kill scim.

Smart Common Input Method 1.4.7
Mobile Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.20GHz
Linux momonti-laptop 2.6.24-27-generic #1 SMP Wed Jan 27 23:54:28 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

Code:

MemTotal:       221116 kB
MemFree:         14932 kB
SwapTotal:     1020116 kB
SwapFree:       764404 kB

I've checked /etc/network/interfaces to make sure localhost is listed.

I have checked the integrity of the hard disk using SpinRite and I've used Windows XP Home off of a partition on the same disk since this problem has started. I do not think its a hard drive problem.

Edit: Please see next post.

**sweetpea24** · February 7th, 2010

Ok, I've traced the problem back to scim.

After I entered my login information in gdm, I switched to a tty (crtl+alt+1) and ran top and htop. I saw that scim was hogging all of my ram and I killed it. Magically gnome finished starting almost immediately.

To see the logs I copied syslog archives from /var/log to ~/syslog and ungizipped them.

Code:

$ mkdir ~/syslog && cp /var/log/syslog* ~/syslog
$ cd ~/syslog
$ gunzip -d *.gz

Next, I concatonated all the logs and grepped for "scim"

Code:

cat * | grep scim

I've attached the logs below and pasted it here: http://pastebin.ca/1789451

From here, I'm not sure what to do. How do I fix scim so that it doesn't crash at system startup?

**sweetpea24** · February 21st, 2010

Since the problem was with scim I hastily deleted the .scim directory in ~/. Fortunately, this fixed the problem and the system has been starting quickly since.