Hello,
I have a Debian Lenny linux with fluxbox 1.0.0, firefox 3.0.6, Xserver-Xorg 1.4.2, amd64 arch.
I haven't installed any firefox addon.
Sometime (3 times a week (I use my pc 6 hours a day)), while I'm using firefox and I click something (a link or the back button...etc) my X soft crash (The pointer not change its form, I can move the mouse pointer but click not work, Keyboard not work, no way to switch to virtual console or kill the application or ctrl-alt-del).

The only thing that I can do is to press once the power button on the case and the shutdown process start and halt my linux.

The problem appears only when I use firefox and click on something but I can't reproduce the problem because it appears occasionally.

I know that there are less information here so:
Where can I read firefox log or fluxbox log or something else that can help me to solve my problem? I try to read dmesg and xorg.0.log but it seems that there aren't problems there.

Someone have the same problem?

Thanks

What display card do you use?

I once had the same type of behaviour (almost exactly what you describe) with a bad AMD videocard.

I have also experienced this with bad RAM.

However, in my case, this occurred in all applications (logically, since it was hardware faults).

Can you test if this happens if you do NOT use firefox?

It is highly unlikely that firefox itself could cause this kind of system crash, Linux systems' architecture is much too robust... (I think).

I strongly suspect you have some kind of intermittent hardware trouble...

Thank you for your answer rylan76,
My hardware is quite new (2 mounth).
My video card is NVIDIA® GeForce 7100

I do another type of test:

I try to link another computer to my network and connect via ssh to the soft crashed PC when a crash happen.
Killall -9 firefox and I see with ps the message:

firefox <defunct>

I try to kill another X program and give me the same

program <defunct>

So I kill fluxbox (my X server die while I kill fluxbox) and I have again control over my comupter.

I'm waiting another crash to do other testing

Hi there,

I don't think you have a problem with your card. And, by the way, if you killall -9 firefox, it is no wonder that your firefox window "disappears". You are exctly telling your system to do so.

What version of Firefox are you running? I remember having the same problem, when I was running an older version of Firefox. Try updating to the latest version.

Cheers

I'm getting much of the same using Ubuntu 9.04.

Again, keyboard doesn't respond, mouse curser still moves but will not action anything and I have to hold my power button until the machine powers off (that may have something to do with it being told to bring up a shutdown menu rather than it not shutting down).

I've not tried to ssh into the machine but im sure it wouldn't be a problem, will try that later on tonight.

The machine is a Fujitusu Siemans V2000 Amilo Pro, Centrino 1.60, 768mb of ram and the usuall onboard intel video and sound stuff (which aint too shabby with openGL).

Unfortuantly I don't know enough about Debian / Ubuntu just yet so I was wondering brennino if you have found any useful log file or if you get a segmentation fault or any crazys like that?

Thanks all!

Hello nad101,

I believe your problem is quite a bit different than what is mentioned here. Most probably a manoeuvre of some type is freezing your window, but not the X server (since oyu can still move you mouse). You can try to kill this application with the command "killall -9 firefox". Should close your firefox browser, for which you just need to restart it to be back on track.

Cheers

Hmm I have had this same type of behaviour on perfectly good hardware with Ubuntu - i. e. random freezes, mouse cursor still visible but nothing else responding. I installed Fedora 9 on the same hardware and it worked perfectly. The fact that you have other processes than firefox being marked <defunct> might indicate you have some form of kernel incompatibility??

Yeah I was thinking something along those lines. I have managed to shy away from Ubuntu until about two weeks ago (as it is then that I discovered that it does actually work pretty well) and have been thinking that I may move to a new flavour of linux...

The really big thing for me is the really really REALLY good package management & network management *sigh*

In anycase, my search for an OS continues!

Sorry if I reply to this very old thread but after a lot of time I understand what was the problem and my answer can help other people with the same issue.

My linux box froze because of ndiswrapper. I used ndiswrapper with windows driver for my pci wireless adapter and this is why my system sometime randomly froze. If your Linux box randomly froze with a non responsive keyboard and you are using ndiswrapper, I recommend to uninstall ndiswrapper and see if the problem appears again.
I recommend to use only native Linux driver if they are available.

I put solved in title

Bre