For the past couple of weeks, my system has been freezing at seemingly random times. When I kill possible offending processes from a virtual terminal and switch back to XFCE, nothing will have changed. I've tried to keep the number of processes to a bare minimum and, recently, it hadn't crashed for multiple days until I watched a video with mozplugger in epiphany.

Has anyone possibly experienced similar behavior?

I was thinking for a while that Flash was the culprit but it has crashed before with virtually everything closed.

Is there any easy way to diagnose such a problem? I was hoping a log file would contain helpful information but that doesn't seem to be the case.


For the past couple of weeks, my system has been freezing at seemingly random times. When I kill possible offending processes from a virtual terminal and switch back to XFCE, nothing will have changed. I've tried to keep the number of processes to a bare minimum and, recently, it hadn't crashed for multiple days until I watched a video with mozplugger in epiphany.

Has anyone possibly experienced similar behavior?

I was thinking for a while that Flash was the culprit but it has crashed before with virtually everything closed.


I should point out that GTK error messages are occasionally sent to my terminal, such as the following:

(epiphany:17115): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_window_group_remove_window: assertion `GTK_IS_WINDOW_GROUP (window_group)' failed



Thanks

Hi, what I'd suggest here is trying to elimiate whether this is a software or hardware problem.
If you can download knoppix 5.11 and run as a live CD, you should be able to play your video, and even better, as knoppix is a live CD, this will be eliminating your software altogether, as it runs entirely in RAM.

If you do get a crash, it then maybe hardware related. One thing I would do is remove your case, buy an air duster and give the motherboard CPU and fans and vents a spray, elimiate overheating and remove and reseat your memory (use ESP wristbands).

Many system events are recorded in /var/log/messages but you may also find useful help in /var/messages/Xorg.log as well.
HTH

Some questions about the locked up state:

1. Is anything displayed on the screen?
2. Does the mouse cursor move?
3. Do the keyboard caps lock / numlock indicators change when you press those keys?
4. Does the system respond to sysreq + REISUB?

Thanks for the help.

hal8000b: Great suggestion. Not sure why that hadn't occurred to me. I wanted to attempt to figure out whether it was a problem with HW or SW but I wasn't sure how other than connecting my hdd to a different computer. I already have a bunch of Live CDs. I will have to try this after the next lockup. I've checked the last few lines of those two log files and didn't find anything of interest.

matthewg42:

1: Yes, the display doesn't change. However, I cannot minimize or select any of the windows. The xfce4-panel clock still ticks, but that's about it.
2: Mouse cursor still moves.
3: Will have to try.
4: I was unaware of this keystroke, so I Googled it. That's a nice thing to know and I will have to test it on the next freeze.

Before testing 4, when it next happens, see if control-alt-backspace will kill the x-server. Also, see if you can get a terminal using control-alt-f1.

If you can get a terminal then try logging in and running top or similar and seeing if there is some process sitting at 100% and do other checks to see if you can figure out what is going on.

Since you cannot movee or resize any windows, maybe it is the window manager process which is dying... It's hard to say.

Thanks, I am able to switch to a virtual terminal and I've tried killing processes from the terminal on numerous occasions with no effect.

I reinstalled XFCE about a day ago and haven't had any crashes yet, so that could be it. With any luck, it will continue in this way.