Total system lock when running gnome on Fedora
 

Hi all -

I'm having a very frustrating problem with my Fedora box. Basically it will lock up periodically, but I can trigger the lock by doing specific things.

Info:
Fedora Core 1 (kernel 2.4.22-1.2166)
P4 2.4c HT
Asus P4P800 D
MSI nvidia Ti4200 128 meg vid card
1 gig matched corsair ram

running dual displays as two separate X displays

When it started:
All was working perfectly for months, and I don't remember making any changes, but one day it just started to crash. I very well may have installed or updated something a few days prior and just did not experience the crash right away.

Details:
Computer locks up when using the gnome desktop. It can happen any time I am doing any window manipulation (could be OK all night and then happen), but I can make it happen right away if I open a bunch of windows in my left (primary) display and start closing them.

It will not happen if I am playing a game in full screen mode no matter how long I play for. Also, I can have many videos playing at the same time, be running CPUburn and moving large chunks of data from my drive into ram and back to the drive again - as long as I don't manipulate any of the windows, it will work flawlessly.

I doubt it is ram, because I never have file corruption, I can make it happen from a fresh boot with little ram in use, and the computer functions normally even when the ram is 100% in use as long as I don't manipulate any windows. Also, KDE seems to work fine all the time on both screens.

What I have tried since it started:
Tried three different kernels (all 2.4.22, but different builds)
Tried different versions of the Nvidia driver (currently using the most recent 5xxx version, but the 4xxx version was causing the problem as well)
Updated all packages that had updates
Looked over all logs (all logs look fine - they look as if the computer was just hard-reset suddenly. No report of errors around the time of lock up. I have checked out the XFree logs before X starts to make sure I could see them too)
Updated my BIOS

Nothing I have tried has changed anything at all.



Any ideas? I just like gnome more than KDE, but this is totally making it impossible to use!

Thanks
bug

Arg - forgot to mention that by total lock I mean TOTAL lock - SSH dies, smb dies, everything dies. No response from anything at all. No ping, no log entries, nothing. The system does not reset though, the image on screen just freezes and it will stay that way for hours if left to its own.

OK - it happens in KDE too. Just took longer to reproduce. Doesn't seem to be happening in Windows on the same machine though.

Arg - maybe time to re-install!

I am having a very similar problem, except I'm running on a Laptop. Here's my info
Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop
Pentium 3 , 1.2 Ghz
1 GB RAM
Fedora Core 3, kernel 2.6.12-1.1372_FC3

I had been having the problem for the last month, and seemed to start out of nowhere. Not having updated my system in a while, I did a 'yum update' last night, and had the problem again today.

My lockup seems to be connected with the screen saver. If it's been on for awhile and the screensaver kicks in, sometimes (and that's the frustrating part - sometimes) it will totally lock up. It wil be completely inaccessible - no keyboard response, no SSH, nothing running. A couple of times I was able to cause the problem by opening the screensaver preferences menu, and as soon as I make any change to it, it would lock. But not every time.

Could anyone suggest any test(s) we could run to diagnose this?

Thanks

rhythmsection

I'm having a similar problem, but only when trying to install games in Point2Play (worked fine under Mandrake 10.1). Complete lockup. Screen freeze and can even bounce to another terminal. The folks at transgaming seem to think it may be some incompatability in the kernel.

Curretly using kernel: 2.6.12-1.1398_FC4

stunter

There was a post in another forum (reply to insectile) that it may possibly be a RAM failure, which would tend to explain why it is intermittent, since it would depend on when a particular block got accessed. The suggestion was to run memtest86 on the RAM.

I installed memtest86, and it runs a very thorough test (takes over 3 hours, and runs many different tests). There were no errors found in my RAM. However, you may want to try this as well. I just did a
'yum install memtest86+'
(include the '+' sign).

rs