Debian 6 Constantly Freezing

[hcaulfield57]

Hello,

I'm new to Debian, and semi-new to Linux. I recently installed Debian 6 on my old Dell Dimension 2350, hoping to get some new performance out of the machine. The installation went really well, however the OS is very laggy and after a few minutes everything will freeze, requiring a reboot to start using the computer again. I only have 512mb of ram, so I decided to install Debian with xfce, as I assumed that I would be able to run it with that little ram. Does anyone have any idea what the problem may be? Could it be a hardware issue, as this is a very old computer? Or am I just expecting too much from the computer?

Thank You

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

I'm not a pro on Debian proper, but maybe I can help grab some more info.
Could you post some more information on your system specs? CPU type? Video card?
How many programs do you have open when your system freezes? Is it normally the same applications, or same number of applications?

512 RAM will run a Debian box with a GUI, though you may want to go lighter than Xfce if you plan on having several apps open at the same time. And if you have a CPU like a P3 or P4 (something around 1GHz) you will begin noticing laggy response.
Openbox or IceWM may be a little better for your needs.

[hcaulfield57]

I actually decided to reinstall Debian, this time with Openbox, and the performance is better, but still lacking, considering the fact that Iceweasel is lagging just from scrolling down pages. I was about to say that it hasn't frozen since the reinstall, however it just did haha.

The cpu is an Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz, it doesn't have a video card that I'm aware of.

[jayd512]

Quite possibly an integrated graphics chip.
Did you set up a swap partition during install?
Post the output of the following:

lspci -knn

free

[cynwulf]

Some web searching reveals that this laptop uses the Intel 845G chipset, so the problem you describe is most likely an intel driver issue (despite this you still need to supply the outputs of the above two commands). The intel driver in squeeze had some issues with the 8xx chipsets.

I would suggest installing the 2.6.39 kernel and xserver-xorg-core, xserver-xorg-video-all, xserver-xorg-input-all, libdrm2, libdrm-intel1 all from backports, reboot into the new kernel and see if the problem persists.

Looking at the specs, it should be ok to run Xfce once the video driver problem is resolved.

[hcaulfield57]

lspci -knn

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface [8086:2560] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device [8086:2562] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: i915
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:24c2] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:24c4] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:24c7] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:24cd] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge [8086:244e] (rev 82)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge [8086:24c0] (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller [8086:24cb] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: ata_piix
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller [8086:24c3] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller [8086:24c5] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0147]
	Kernel driver in use: Intel ICH
01:09.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T [14e4:4401] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:8127]
	Kernel driver in use: b44

free

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        513660     200304     313356          0       5832     101664
-/+ buffers/cache:      92808     420852
Swap:      1002488          0    1002488

Should I simply just add the backports dependency and then install those items? Will I have to remove any other packages installed right now? How about the kernel? Will this possibly mess up my system? (Not that it's working that great right now anyways).

Thank You!

[jayd512]

Installing those items shouldn't mess anything up... including the kernel.
As you won't be removing the old kernel, you'll still be able to boot to a working system if things happen to go hairy.
So, go ahead with those suggestions from caravel, and let us know how it goes.

[hcaulfield57]

As you won't be removing the old kernel, you'll still be able to boot to a working system if things happen to go hairy.

Not sure I understand how I do this. I understand how to add the backports repository and how to install the new kernel, but what happens then?

I reboot the system and which kernel will it be using? Do I have to tell it what to use? Not sure I understand this part.

Also when I add the new repository do I create spaces between it and the other repositories in the sources.list file or does it matter?

PS. My fan on this computer sounds like its about to die, would that adversely effect performance, maybe computer getting too hot (although it doesn't seem like it).

[jayd512]

After installing a new kernel, GRUB2 should update and give you the option of which kernel to boot into on start-up.
If not, run the command:

update-grub

Use sudo or su - accordingly.

On the repo list, I'm assuming you mean spaces between the line entries... don't really need them. But it does make for easier reading if you need to edit them.

The fan would cause me a little bit of alarm. If you happen to watch videos or do anything that causes some high CPU activity, the heat build-up could cause you some issues. So it's just a little something to look out for.

[hcaulfield57]

After installing a new kernel, GRUB2 should update and give you the option of which kernel to boot into on start-up.
If not, run the command:

update-grub

Use sudo or su - accordingly.

Will all of my previous configurations (ie. installed programs, settings, ect) remain in place when booting into the new kernel? You will have to forgive me, I don't conceptually understand the concept.

Thank you everyone for your help, I will post back to see how this went.