I have a HP Pavilion 471 UK with a HP pavilion v90 monitor and run two versions of linuxfromscratch and beyond linuxfromscratch [BLFS](versions 6.2) with a few minor upgrades from the books. I also have Mandriva 2007 installed. Mandriva and one of the BLFS uses xorg 6.9 and one other BLFS uses XFree86-4.6.0. KDE-3.6 and other light desktops such as windowmaker and xfce-4.4 are available.


However, no matter what system I run, there is a risk that the desktop environment will freeze unexpectedly, either straight away or later on, no mouse and the clock stops. Main culprits are Openoffice.org and Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, which take a long time to get started, slower than the Windows equivalents. (I have Windows XP Home, which I prefer not to use, which doesn't seem to give me any problems).

None of the getouts work (Ctrl-alt-backspace or F1 or SysRq) and the six finger hold of the power button is my only response.

My system is not bleeding edge: 1.7 GHz Pentium 4, 843MB memory and an GeForce4-MX420 64MB SDR. 0.5GB swap space is available to all linux distros, but this isn't helping much.

What is the weak link which makes my system freeze on me?

Andrew

I am with you on this. I have Ubuntu 7.10 (it happened with 7.04 also) that it just locks up randomly on me. It can go fine for about a week sometimes and then just locks. I was wondering myself if Firefox could be a problem. Most times when my girlfriend uses firefox is when it freezes but sometimes for me I could be doing just about anything. For a while I even thought of the screensaver which I guesss could bring me back to what you said the x server. Maybe one thing would be after you reboot from the lockup is check your system logs. See if there is anything that may worry you to post here and maybe someone can tell you what it means and if it is a problem. Also which kernel are you using (uname -r). I am really eager to find this answer along with many other people.

My computer can lock up several times in a day. Every time I reboot it, there is no guarantee that Linux will behave.

Yep. I just installed PCLinux and it's my first experience with Linux and so far it doesn't seem very stable. Random lockups at just about any time. Nothing cutting edge here either. P4 2.8 with an ATI 9500 Pro graphics card.