Linux Randomly locking
 

Hello all,

I was wondering what ways there are to check to see what is locking my system. It seems that anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 hours into running GNOME everything freezes and nothing, not even the keyboard or mouse, respond to my commands.

I have no idea how to isolate this problem, any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Darren Gould

Oh yeah, maybe a few more details might help.

The locking seems to happen regardless of whether I use GNOME or KDE and it seems to happen regardless of what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm moving a window, sometimes I'm downloading stuff, sometimes I'm in nautilus, ... you get the picture.

I'd like to look in the system log to see if it gives me any idea's but I'm not 100% sure I know where it is. Should be in /var/log/???, right?

Darren

/var/log/messages is where you want to look first, but you should look at the other logs in there as well. Type "less dmesg" to browse through your boot-time messages and make sure there's nothing amiss there. Lastly, use the top or ps command to look at your running processes. You might have some unnecessary procs running in the background, in which case they should be disabled.

To get more specific, you'll need to post more information such as you distro (and its version), CPU/hardware stats, network situation, etc.

Yeah ok.

I checked out the syslog and both times I've had it crash it was doing something with gconfd. But that doesn't explain it crashing the same way in KDE.

I'm running a Pentium II 350MHz machine with 64MB Ram, S3 Virge video, On Board Sound CDMI something, it's a PC Chips M590 Motherboard, Quantum Fireball 15GB hard drive, Sony CD Rom.

I'm running RH 7.2 but I had the exact same problem on Mandrake.

The problem seems entirely too persistent to be anything but a core problem, either XFree86, the kernel, or the hardware, something like that.

Thanks for the help,
Darren