I reinstalled SUSE for practice several days ago and choose all but one default. The one default I didn't chose was the one where it asks if you want to download all the upgrades. I thought I'd let it get them on the fly instead of taking all day like the first install.

Well, I think that was a mistake, unless an expert here has a more sinister reason that something on my computer, with a 1GHz uProcessor, and nearly 1GB of RAM, would seize the HDD and hold on so tightly, to the exclusion of any other activity except mouse movement for minutes at a time. Sometimes, like just now, moved the mouse and it took 5 seconds to come out of screen saver. During that 5 seconds, no mouse cursor.

While this siezure is going on, the HDD light is on constantly, I can sometimes move the mouse cursor, etc. and click on programs several times in frustration. Finally, when whatever is happening releases control, I get multi copies of what I was trying to open.

Is this a background downloading of upgrades? Without notification? Or something more sinister? What do you guys think?

Any tests I can run with the built in software?

Run top and see what's using the resources

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

If A is true, then performance will be poor and B will follow. So it is most likely that nothing sinister is going on (nothing sinister, but unpleasant all the same).

Agree with the suggestion of mason; run top. You might have found ksysguard easier to work with, but you would probably struggle too much to get it open and working. It may not be as trivial as it perhaps should be as some of the time spent in disk I/O goes into a black hole called 'system' and that makes it less clear what is going on.

On 10.3 (What version are you using? Package management is so heavily revised in 11.0 that no experience of mine is really relevant.), I have seen individual/multiple software installs 'pseudo-crash', with the rpm process being locked seemingly for ever at high cpu usage levels. In that case, you have to kill the rpm process to progress beyond that point.

It's openSUSE 10.3.

When you say 'run top', what is that exactly? Where do I find it? (Sorry, but this is the Linux-Newbie section).

Thx.

... in a command line session type "top" (without the quotation marks; that's the letters t, o and p with a carriage return (enter key) at the end).

This should be enough to run top. To understand top in more detail type in command line session "man top".

Doh! Too obvious to open a terminal and type 'Top' for me I guess. Just not use to dropping back to 'DOS' via a terminal anymore. From now on I'll just try that trick first instead of looking all over and inside the desktop.


OK, so this morning, I fired up the openSUSE 10.3 machine and guess what? The hard drive is now dead. Doesn't even spin up. SUSE seems to have burned out the drive motor. The warrenty expired in Mar. '04 so I got my money out of the thing but it does kind of tick me off. If SUSE hadn't been accessing the drive almost continuously, I don't think it would have died. JMO.

So for now this thread is as dead as the drive.