firefox 3.0 freezing system kubuntu 7.10

[imranka]

Problem:

In the last few days my system froze several time, whenever I'm using firefox (without firefox it never occurred, though it can't be inferred definitely from this info that firefox is behind this). I can't move my mouse, keyboard is not responding too. Only, by pressing the restart button I was able to restart the system.

Now, how I can diagnose the problem?
which logs should I see?

Details:
Firefox 3.0 (compiled)
System: 32bit, Intel C2D, Kubuntu 7.10


Thanks

[reed9]

Any reason you aren't upgrading to a more recent Ubuntu? Support for 7.10 is being dropped in, what, 5 days?

Otherwise, are you using flash?

Open firefox from the terminal and watch for error messages.

[imranka]

Any reason you aren't upgrading to a more recent Ubuntu? Support for 7.10 is being dropped in, what, 5 days?

Because I don't want to take the headache of reconfiguring my system.

Otherwise, are you using flash?

Do you mean, when the system is freezing is firefox is trying to open any flash page? No.

[QUOTEOpen firefox from the terminal and watch for error messages.[/QUOTE]

That won't help I guess, as I've to hard reboot the system won't that messages will be lost? Otherwise, I've no way to see the messages as keyboard is also stop working.

[elija]

You could redirect stderr to a file

firefox 2>yourfile

[reed9]

Because I don't want to take the headache of reconfiguring my system.

I'm sorry to say, but I'd wager you're going to have far more of a headache trying to maintain an outdated unsupported OS. At least upgrade to 8.04, since it will be supported until 2011, I believe. You should be able to upgrade without having to reconfigure everything. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardyUpgrades

[imranka]

Thanks elija, I piped the output to a log file as you've said, but nothing's there. And, the freezing occurred without firefox running too a couple of time.

And this freezing phenomenon started only after I've started using a wireless datacard ran with wvdial. Is there any connection between that two?

Or else, can somebody tell me which log I've to check? I've checked dmesg, syslog etc, but couldn't find anything related. Should I paste my dmesg here for investigation by you?

[toupeiro]

If you type aboutlugins and if you see flash loaded, then the library is active, whether or not something in flash is currently on the page.

7.10 is a bit dated, and any version of flash you are pulling from a repository would be greatly obsolete.

Step 1 would be to remove any old version of flash you have installed with aptitude or by removing the libflashplayer.so that you downloaded.

Step 2 would be to update your version of flash to the latest Adobe version,

Adobe - Adobe Flash Player

Since your version of ubuntu is outdated, you are going to want to select the linux tar.gz version.

Inside this file, you will find a file called libflashplayer.so

In a terminal window, and from your home directory type:

cd .mozilla
mkdir plugins

now, you will want to extract libflashplayer.so into this directory you just created. Once you have extracted the file there, close all instances of firefox and reopen them.

This version of flash works without all the ndispluginwrapper garbage which I've found to really give Firefox heartburn.


If you still have issues, your last ditch effort would be to close all firefox windows, rename your .mozilla directory to something else, then reopen firefox. The .mozilla directory will be recreated, and then you can try following the steps above to get flash10 back in firefox with a clean config directory.

All this said, you really should consider upgrading..

Best of luck!

T.

[devils casper]

First of all check if problem is with FireFox or Display.
Execute this

cd
mv .mozilla .mozilla.bak

Open Firefox and check if it freezes again.

[imranka]

First of all check if problem is with FireFox or Display.
Execute this

cd
mv .mozilla .mozilla.bak

Open Firefox and check if it freezes again.

Thanks for all the replies.

I'll check this today.

But as I've mentioned, the freezing occurred even when the firefox is not opened and this freezing started after I've started using bsnl datacard (though a linear relation cannot be established between data card & freezing phenomenon right now), what do you think, can there really be any connection?

[devils casper]

Try renaming .mozilla folder as I suggested earlier.
Lets check Graphics Card and driver too.
Execute this

sudo lspci | grep -i vga
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Post output here.