Suse 11.2 Unstable

[nbob]

Hello. I've been searching for a stable distro for my computer without any luck. I've tried Debian, Ubuntu, and Suse.

My machine is a pc with 2GHz Processor and 30GB of hard drive. My graphics are Intel 82845G/GL (Brookdale)

What begins to happen after a few hours is that the machine will randomly freeze up. By that I mean that everything that can be "clicked" on on the screen is unresponsive -- I can move my mouse around but clicking doesn't do anything. In addition, my keyboard is froze so nothing I type works. Also, there is no way to bring up another terminal (ALT-F2 does nothing)

The only thing that unfreezes the computer and reboots it is Alt-SysRq-r-s-e-i-u-b.


take care.

[gogalthorp]

Tell use more about the hardware. How much memory. What kind of processor? A 30gig hard drive is kind of old how old it the computer? This could be a thermal problem if it happens with all distros.

[nbob]

Hi. Thanks for the help. My processor is an Intel Pentium4 --> 2GHz. My hard drive is a 30GB Maxtor. The computer is a Gateway and is about 6 years old.

I'm running a dual boot with Windows XP. Windows XP runs fine with no freeze-ups so I doubt it's a thermal issue.

[nbob]

Hi. Here's some information I gathered from the top command upon my last freeze-up:

top - 21:12:55 up 3:26 4 users, load average: 0.08, 0.21, 0.26
tasks: 113 total, 3 running, 110 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
cpu(s): 2.3% us, 3.3% sy, 0.0% mi, 94.4% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si, 0.0% st
mem: 1289484k total, 877388k used, 412096k free, 50900k buffers
swap: 2931852k total, 0k used, 2931852k free, 613692k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7377 nick 20 0 98732 18m 12m R 2.3 1.4 1:01.50 npviewer.bin
7250 nick 20 0 242m 98m 23m R 1.7 7.8 9:20.88 firefox
3338 nick 20 0 2336 1020 776 S 0.7 0.1 1:06.99 top
7306 nick 20 0 2336 1016 768 R 0.7 0.1 0:20.55 top
0004 root 15 -5 0000 0000 000 S 0.3 0.0 0:02.93 ksoftirqd/0
0001 root 20 0 1940 0660 572 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.14 init
0002 root 15 -5 0000 0000 000 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
.
.
.
Two things stand out to me: the 98732 number under VIRT for PID 7377, and PID4 whose command is "ksoftirqd/0"

[nbob]

Just trying to learn how to debug my problem. I just tried to run "ksystemlog" in the KDE terminal. I got the following error:

The file '/var/log/syslog' does not exist.

How do I access syslog or recreate it?

[gogalthorp]

Are you always on a flash page in Firefox when it freezes? And what do you mean by freeze? Is top still running or does that also freeze. How did you grab the top text if the machine is frozen????

[nbob]

Hi thanks for the help.

I would say I'm usually running flash when it freezes up. But in the case above I'm not so sure those webpages I had open used flash. So I'm a little confused why flash was running at the time it froze.

Definition of "freezing up" -- system is oblivious to any commands or mouse clicks. Only way to reboot computer is to do the Alt-SysRq-r-s-e-i-u-b or pull the plug. "Top" in the terminal window freezes as well.

I was anticipating that the system would freeze up and so I had top running on the bottom half of my screen and I only was using the top half (so the terminal was always visible). Sure enough, the system froze up. So I was able to capture the data that way.

I don't know how to access my system log (see above) or I would have checked that out as well.

[white_hound]

System log can be viewed with root access at /var/log/messages.
It still might be a thermal issue. You see, the flash for Linux implementation is ... let's say ... worse than the one for Windows, so it tends to heat your processor up much more. Google for some performance tests (like calculating PI with some extreme accuracy or viewing some 10 HD movies, or so) and run them in Windows ... Try to see if Windows still runs Ok.