Spilled the Beans
I've had one freeze.
I was watching CNET TV in Google Chrome and then I closed the browser. The audio kept playing, I couldn't stop it, and then by itself the audio quit and then I got a "Black Screen of Death". I did a cold reboot and it worked fine.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
Newblueboy, the freezes i was experiencing seem to have been quite different.
Though i might be doing (from what i could tell) quite different things before the freeze, the result was always the same: instant freeze, no mouse activity, and no ability to close applications, and no black screen, just a frozen screen. However, if i had an audioplayer open the last quarter second or so of the music would loop (which would not happen in a flash player, if one was playing at the time), until i hard rebooted.
Perhaps you freeze was flash related? If you are lucky you might be able to trace your freeze. Try searching "/var/log/messages" and "/var/log/syslog" to see if you can see anything that would indicate what happened at the time of your crash, then search around what you find there.
Also, you might check "var/log/kern.log", to see if you experienced a kernel panic. There is usually allot printed in these logs (which can also be accessed via the Log File Viewer application), so keep an eye on the time stamps printed on the left of each entry, to narrow down your search. Hope im not patronising.
Any other tips on diagnosing system freezes would be most welcome.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
This 10.10 install was fine until just recently, maybe less than a week ago. Still running fine in background, router, servers, etc. just no mouse or keyboard response. I'll look into the remote login/compiz issue next time. Hard booted it three times now in the past 2 days.
Must be result of a recent update.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
NadirPoint, thats very interesting. I had no way to tell about background processes (that i know of), as i am running an isolated desktop install, and with no access to mouse or keyboard...
However, when i did experience a freeze, judging from drive and fan activity, the system wasnt overloaded. So, conceivably all sorts of processes could have continued unimpeded. Perhaps, i was also just loosing mouse and keyboard input too.
Have you tried pressing alt gr + fn + r e i s u b? This key configuration is supposed to initiate various processes, ending in the safe power down of you computer, and a second or so should be allowed between presses of the letter keys.
It never worked for me during a freeze though, what with no keyboard input.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
No, there's no input recognized, so... Just happened twice in the past couple hours and remote login showed now unusual activity or lack thereof. I have booted the previous kernel for now and will wait and see. The problem diagnosing this machine is sometimes it may sit here running as my LAMP server for a day two at a time with nobody logging on locally to use it, so it could be in this condition for quite awhile before it was noticed.
Last edited by NadirPoint; April 1st, 2011 at 03:58 AM.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
Interesting. I could never find any pertinent readouts on scanning /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog or var/log/kern.log after any of the freezes i experienced. Often there were no readouts at all for the time of freeze. I would be interested to know if you narrow it down to the kernel, as i was not always experiencing this issue, so an update at some point might have caused it. Sometimes i would expereinece freezes as frequently as two in a couple of hours, more frequently one a day, sometimes even one per two/three or even four days, so it was very hard to pin down. As i mentioned above, Debian has been much more stable for me, though it has freezed once over the last two weeks. Yet, presumably both Ubuntu and Debian are running the latest kernel?
5 Cups of Ubuntu
I used to have freeze problem with my old laptop, but it's not because of the OS' fault. It's because that part of components of my laptop is broken, not the RAM, not the HDD. It's my wireless part and something else... which I don't know LOL. Also my BIOS has displayed some weird looking message telling me about some error code.
I further confirmed it by switching to other Linux distro, and it froze too. So then I bought a new laptop, and freeze never happens again on my new laptop.
A Carafe of Ubuntu
In my case you might be right. Swiched to Debian and have experienced a similar freeze. My laptop is quite old. However, once every two weeks i can handle, Debian, once a day was just bloody annoying, Ubuntu. That said my girlfriend had been running XP on this machine for a long time, before i bought it off her, and tells me she did not experience any regular freezing. So, ....
A Carafe of Ubuntu
This is a 4-year old HP Pavilion Slimline with the Nvidia 512mb graphics option on which .35-27 seems to run quite happily, as have all previous versions since installing 10.10 shortly after it became available. .35-28, not so much. Whatever the problem is, I believe the graphics/kernel interface may be at issue. As I stated earlier, the system seems to run fine, just apparently no display. Hard to tell if anything you are doing with the mouse or keyboard is getting in without the display. Just a wild-assed guess.
Looks like I am stuck waiting for the next kernel before being relived from invoking the Grub menu upon restarts.
Spilled the Beans
Dear Forum ,
I've an old desktop with an Intel 85625 Integrated Graphics card under 10.10 and using mainly Metacity . On Metacity or Compiz I've experienced freezes which can be relieved only with ctl-alt-sysreq-K with the need to relogin and pick up where you left off , with Firefox usually presenting the 'Embarassed about this message' and asking for new session or restore . The problem seems to me to be a GPU lockup usually generated with >1 window in Firefox , with one window currently downloading a file and in another window attempting to scroll down the screen too quickly , especially if the scroll window contains a lot of flash video stuff . I just take more care now to see if the scroll screen is fully resolved before spinning the wheel . My guess it's problems in the generic driver as I don't bother with the specific Intel driver which I think is 'blacklisted' for my old machine anyhow ,
Best Wishes
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