how to debug lockups and freezes ?
 

hello,

how does one debug system lockups ? for e.g. if i am cruising around on mandrake 10 and my system locks up or freezes what should i do? how do i get a debug log or something like that to trace this ?

what does linux have to debug these issues? i want to capture some logs, traces, screenshots, etc so i can report a bug (assuming i have found one).

i am a newbie, so any insight is appreciated.

Look in /var/log

The files to look at are syslog and messages usually. A frozen system is hard to debug. Usually I find it is either the video card driver or memory/cpu too far overclocked.

If you have another computer, see if you can ssh into the frozen one, you can sometimes do this, depending upon the problem. You can also try ctrl-alt-backspace to restart x or ctrl-alt-f2 to get a terminal.