Afternoon all.

After two or three weeks of using Mandrake Linux 10.1 very happily (after trialling many many others) the system has become rather unstable within the last couple of days.

I'm getting random freezes of the whole computer; usually only fixable by the old Alt+SysRqst+B combination but sometimes only with a hard reboot.

Upon restart I've gone through all the system logs I can lay my hands on but usually there's absolutely nothing there apart from the line saying 'restart'.

It usually happens when the system isn't being used particularly hard (eg i can run graphically intensive games for hours with no probs) - just a minute ago the only things I had running was mplayer in a console and I tried to open a folder in Konqueror for example. Unfortunately there is no obvious pattern - it froze when I was viewing pictures in GQView with no music playing half an hour before for example.

I've got plenty of RAM, cooling isn't a problem and all the relevent drivers seem to be working faultlessly.

Do any of you gurus know of a decent logging programme that will actually let me catch which applications/services are responsible for this? It would be quite nice to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks in advance


PS: Mdk 10.1, XOrg 6.8.2 and KDE 3.2

Have you ruled out a Hardware problem
Dust can cause all sorts of problems, dont be afraid to lift the lid and stick the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner in there.

Are you dual booting ? does the freezing happen with the other OS if there is one

Give us a bit more info on your hardware.

Have you checked the Mandrake HW compatibilty list to make sure everything will work with mandrake 10.1
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/hardware.php3

Are you using Mandrake 10.1 Official or Community, I have come across the occasional problem with community editions that were not there in the final official release.

hope this helps
floppy