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Old 05-15-2005, 11:22 PM   #1
Ineed2muchHelp
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Fedora 3 Freezing always


Hello. I am really new to Linux and I am trying to install Linux for the second time. The first system was RH 8 and everything went pretty good aside from some basic networking. I then decided to update to Fedora 3, and have had problems ever since.

The entire system freezes, completely, after some random time. Sometimes it is when opening a program, but it doesn't have to be. Just sitting there sometimes it freezes.

I thought it was maybe Fedora and tried Ubuntu but that froze too, which leads me to think it is some hardware problem but I'm only guessing. Knowing that the problem wasn't with Fedora I came back to installing Fedora

I really can't stand windows and want to have an up to date linux system - that doesn't freeze worse than my windows machine - so I can get back to learning the ins and outs of it.

Where should I start?

The video card is a Riva TnT
it is a 900MHz, 256Megs of Ram, 40Gig HDD.

Any help would be really appreciated.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 12:27 AM   #2
Maestro485
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That's a really strange problem. Honestly I have no idea what could be causing something like that. I think a good place to start would be opening the System Monitor program (under System Tools in the main menu) and seeing if there's some kind of memory leak or process misbehaving. Although a distro obviously doesn't ship with a memory leak, I really don't know where else you could look. You might want to check out the manufacturer site of your pc to see if they have anything to say about it. When I first started using Linux, HP supported Red Hat 9 (which I was using at the time) and they were very helpful.

Edit:

The System Monitor I'm referring to is on the Gnome desktop. KDE has a similar tool, although I'm not sure exactly where it is. I think Gnome is the default for Fedora anyway.

Last edited by Maestro485; 05-16-2005 at 12:29 AM.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 12:37 AM   #3
Ineed2muchHelp
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thanks.....

Strange thing is, I have been updating some of the programs under root and it hasn't froze yet. I know it is something strange. RH8 worked like a charm so I don't think there should be a long term problem but until I know it is stable I don't want to do anything important on it because at any moment it could die on me.

What could be some possible causes?

The system itself was bought from MDG years ago, that I think uses standard parts, but it is a mish-mash of stuff.

Last edited by Ineed2muchHelp; 05-16-2005 at 12:39 AM.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 12:43 AM   #4
cerealdaemon
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One of the first things that I would think about with your system to start off is what exactly you want to put onto it. I installed Fedora onto a system very similar to that. I thought that an Everything install would be good, but don't do that unless you have a fairly beefy system and some hard drive space.

Gnome is the default, though Fedora is packaged with KDE, I would stick with Gnome for the time being, I found it to be less intimidating to new users.

But to the question at hand. I had a similar error while trying to install Ubuntu on a system just the other day, it stalled at 18 and sat there for a half hour. I had to do a hard reboot, generally not good while installing, I replaced the cd drive and used the same media I had been and it solved the problem, it installed just fine. If it is freezing on your install, try to replace some of the parts like cd drive and disconnect some of the PCI peripherals if you don't need them immediately. Fedora should have no problem detecting your vid card, so I doubt thats the problem.

If however, it installs fine ( I really couldn't tell from your post) and it freezes when you are inside the UI, then thats diferent and I'd have to know what you were working on or doing that may have caused it to freeze on you.

But, go ahead and try to reinstall it, but select "custom" when Anaconda asks you install type, and next to the package selector, click on "details" and that will give you a more in depth run down of your packages, so try to get the counter for how much hard drive space it uses to as low as possible and still have a UI and some other stuff.

Try that and see how it goes!
 
Old 05-16-2005, 01:07 AM   #5
Ineed2muchHelp
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Thank you for the response.

The instal is done. The system is up and runs for some, AFAIK, random period of time. When I first noticed it was when I tried to setup evolution. Just stopped. The screen stays the same but the keyboard doesn't work, there is no mouse - but the cd will open/close but still no action from the monitor, and no sign of cpu action. It has happened other times while doing nothing as well.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 01:19 AM   #6
cerealdaemon
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weird weird, that may be a hardware problem, I really can't say for sure, thats odd that it does that though. Perhaps a different kernel version will interact better with your hardware?

open a terminal and type in "uname -r" and that will give you the version of the kernel that you using. if you ran "yum install" then that would update your packages and install the latest kernel, which your system might like better than what you are doing now.

One possible reason that I can think of for your system to be acting like that is if the kernel was compiled with packages for your hardware missing, though you installed it from the cd, so I really don't know, someone on here should have some new ideas though, so never fear!
 
Old 05-16-2005, 01:39 AM   #7
mrcheeks
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hi

Try displaying processes running maybe it is a gnome applet which is freazing your system, or a process you think you killed but which is still running. The tool to display processes is the system menu if i remember, but i am not sure about it.

If you're not use too it, try to close all your programs before closing a login session too, it can help and avoid "zombie processes" to keep on running.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 04:48 AM   #8
Simon Bridge
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This sort of thing is often a video driver issue - like x is not quite using the right driver for the video card. Check the card setup in xorg.conf ... but you may want a visit to you card manufacturers homepage and see if they have linux drivers for you - chances are you are using a generic driver so the change can only be good (well mostly only - er)

(post edit)
Oh yeah - this is probably not the culprit, but it cannot hurt and may help:
Edit your /etc/modprobe.conf so that "alias net-pf-10 off" is on the last line. This switches off ipv6 wot you don't need. It can mess with some processes, though it's mostly assosiated with slow rather than hung systems.

Last edited by Simon Bridge; 05-16-2005 at 04:52 AM.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 06:10 AM   #9
GraemeK
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i've had the same thing on a my ols PII 300 SCSI server. I'm using KDE and it works well but thunderbird crashed the system yesterday. Also now its been configured i'm using a different monitor with it...if i leave the monitor plugged in when it boots up it crashes!! werid. and it know its a generic crt!

i'm not 100% happy with Fedora's stabilty so far.
 
Old 05-16-2005, 12:30 PM   #10
runlevel0
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Re: thanks.....

Quote:
Originally posted by Ineed2muchHelp
Strange thing is, I have been updating some of the programs under root and it hasn't froze yet. I know it is something strange. RH8 worked like a charm so I don't think there should be a long term problem but until I know it is stable I don't want to do anything important on it because at any moment it could die on me.

What could be some possible causes?

The system itself was bought from MDG years ago, that I think uses standard parts, but it is a mish-mash of stuff.
If you haven't messed up much the system, you should be able to get logs related to the system failure from /etc/var/log/messages .

The older backups of /var/log/messages are kept in the same directory in compressed form with the a number and the *.bz2 (or *.gz) suffix.

Open them in the good old midnight commander (type mc on the command line) so you will not need to bother about gzipping and other stuff.

If you don't get smarter from the log's content just copy and paste the suspected error here (use the SHIFT key together with the left mouse button to copy and the middle button to paste).

You could also explain what you understand under the term "freezing": You sit on the GUI and the graphic environment freezes, the system hangs during boot...

This is important, because a 'freezing' inside de graphical environment has many probabilities of being caused by your graphics card.


You should check:

* ACPI
Test if it's running or not in a distro which hangs and one which not. Check also the ACPI settings in your BIOS.

* Disks
I have had some weird 'freezings' a pair of weeks ago. The disks made a sound which reminded me when the system is going down and the disks 'parks' its heads. This was indeed the cause: The disks went too hot and simply switched themselves off as a security measure. Some extra fans did the work and I also use smartmontools to monitor them.

* Graphics Card
Sometimes a missconfigured X server can hang a system, or even an overheating of the card. The symptoms of a freeze caused by a graphics card is that even the mouse pointer gets paralyzed. Check your X logs, in /var/log/X or in your home folder as .xsession-errors (list with ls -a as it is a hidden file). An extra fan can also be a solution.

* Filesystem
I have noticed errors when searching for files after a power-failure and reboot. I have also seen more weird behavior all related to the system being unable to read or write to some files. This sometime can make that a partition is mounted as read-only. This is the easiest to repair. Just use your favorite LiveCD and run e2fsck -vfa /dev/hdXY (whehre XY are the partitions letter and number). If you can't remember how your disk is partitioned use: fdisk -l /dev/hdX (with X being again the drives second letter).

NOTE:
You can almost always reboot a deep-freezed system using the key combination ALT+CTRL+PetSys+B

 
Old 05-16-2005, 03:38 PM   #11
Ineed2muchHelp
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I am in the process of checking those things but something I noticed. I left the system up and running all night and it never froze. Woke up this morning and the system was still putting away. The problem is that this is root, and obviously I can't use that. However when I am logged in as a user it freezes. Could this be a permission thingy or something? Like I said I am new to this so I may be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

It seems like it is just X that is frozen. When I open a cd drawer there is action on the CPU(The red light starts to flash like when it is working on something.). So I am thinking it is an X problem?

Any help?

*I am looking through the message logs but I am not exactly sure what I should be looking for to begin with
 
Old 05-16-2005, 07:57 PM   #12
JrLz
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hm...... you're quite sure that it is about your X server?
you have to check your X Server conf file, to meet your system display..

Just to make sure that it is X's problem, can you restart your X Server??? by pressing ctr l+ alt + backspace?
 
Old 05-17-2005, 08:54 AM   #13
runlevel0
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And another question: Are you perhaps using an Nvidia card such as a Gforce FX 5200?

If you ask me why I'm asking this:

1) I read about this bug in the Gentoo Forums.
2) It reminds your problem
3) I just have had such a freeze when I put my graphics card under heavy load...

The most annoying is that this bug has no clear fix. I don't know if nVidia is going to fix it, because it wasn't present in it's other drivers. So perhaps downloading and installing an older version of the official driver package would help.

Here on this page are some more or less useful URLs related to the bug and some workarounds:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-24703.html

The bug is known as the "pci_badness" bug and is probably hardware related.

If you think this is your case, you can safely ignore the logs, this damn bug does not let any trace in syslog nor in X's logs. Nice issue, isn't it?

Perhaps time to change to ATI?

I will consider this seriously, but I haven't had this problem prior to updating the nVidia drivers.

Note that this bugs should in no way be Linux-specific, but maybe Windows users get a different error message or simply reboot. It would be nice if somebody using any flavour of Win would report the same problem. If we make enough noise, perhaps nVidia will do something to at least patch the error so that we can live with the b0rked hardware.

/me is searching for Euro-friendly ATI retailers



Last edited by runlevel0; 05-17-2005 at 08:57 AM.
 
Old 05-18-2005, 02:51 PM   #14
Ineed2muchHelp
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Hello all,

First of all I want to thank all the great posts. A lot of it has really helped.

I have discovered I do have an Nvidia TNT riva(?) 64 video card. So I went to the nvidia site, downloaded the driver and tried to install it. At first it said it needed the libselinux and Pam packages, so I went out and tried to find them. When I did the libselinux installed fine, but the Pam had two dependencies as well and I can't find one of them anywhere. The one I can't find is the libaudit.so.0 package.

I was doing this through the web searching for the packages. I tried yum but that kept telling me there was nothing to do(so I assumed that it was because the package wasn't in the repository).

Where do I find this package? If that system would stop freezing on me I could finally get off this M$ machine and feel safe. It is a sad day when the xp is the realiable machine... LOL!!
 
Old 05-19-2005, 12:12 AM   #15
Ineed2muchHelp
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Anybody? Where can I find this file? I can't use my computer until it is there, and it is a dependancy for a dependancy for my nvidia driver, which seems to be the reason my computer(gui) freezes without keyboard. I have ran google searches and came up with links that didn't have it after all. It seems like it is an older file? Can that be? SOrry for being a nag, but I really have no idea what to do. Without that file(or some other way of doing this) I may as well through my computer away.

Thanks for any help as always.
 
  


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