Mandriva 2006 randomly freezes
 

I hope someone can help me with this - I am at the end of my tether and really starting to lose faith in Linux(it's meant to be realiable and stable, yes?). First things first, specs! (These are no doubt incomplete/inappropriate, please ask for info needed that I don't provide)

Pentium 4
512Mb Ram
GeForce MMX 440 (512Mb)

Mandriva 2006

At seemingly random intervals, it can be 5 minutes or 5 days, the system will completely lock up, the only responsive thing being the mouse. The keyboard completely locks up (numlock/capslock will not turn off/on), the display is completely unresponsive (freezes to display at time of freeze). I have completely uninstalled Kat, so that is not the issue at hand. There is absolutely no indication that this freeze is about to happen, it just happens. I don't see any change in the hard-disk access behaviour. I have left the computer in this state for long periods of time to see if it recovers, which it does not. I have kaffeine and firefox running all the time, so they may be a factor. When playing an mp3 when a freeze happens, the mp3 will continue to play until the end, but will not loop or move to the next item in the playlist.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks

the ManSizeRooster

Hi,
You might try uninstalling kat...That made a big difference on my system..
jolphil

Thanks for the post jolphil, but I've already uninstalled Kat so that isn't a factor in my problems.

Couple questions, first are you using SATA drives? Second does the HDD activity light stay on constantly?
I had a problem like this with mandriva, and it seemed to me that it was a problem with the SATA controller drivers. In my case I was not willing to go through the trouble to recompile the driver, so I just installed Fedora 4 and it worked find when I used noapic. So you might try adding -noapic to your boot options in /etc/lilo.conf for the kernel you are using. Good luck.

Bill

Quote
I have completely uninstalled Kat, so that is not the issue at hand.

Sorry, I guess i should learn to read..
jolphil

I'm not really sure if I have SATA drives, but there is no change in HDD access patterns compared to when it is running. I get the feeling that this problem I have is related to KDE, as I think KDE manages the keyboard (correct me if I'm wrong), so that would explain it locking up.

You are not really sure if you have SATA drives? In that case im not sure your should be tinkering with linux at all.

You elitist snob.

this happens to me with a p4 1024Mb and a generic Nvidia Geforce4000mx let me guess your card is generic and agp? X would lock up (mouse would move but the cursor wouldn't change) I found that the computer wasn't locked up I could still log in over the network and shutdown and lirc controlling noxmms was still responsive. I did some searching and have come accross 3 solutions:

1) reduce the agp apature size.

this made my freezes less often. but they still happened.

2) reduce the agp speed in your bios.

unfortunately this doesn't seem to be an option for me but almost everyone who tried it said it worked to cut it down from 8x to 4x.

3) the NvAGP option in your xorg.conf or XF86config can be set to "1" (use nvidia's agp code) or "0" (do not use agp).

both of these have been freze free for me so far, but I'm using "1" for obvious reasons. here is the relative snippet of my xorg.conf:

just copy the NvAGP line into yours or go into your bios and find the agp speed and cut it in half either should clear up your problem.

I had a similar problem while using Mandriva 2006. It turned out that it was totally unrelated to anything with the software. It was a power problem. I had too many computers (5) running on the same 20 amp circuit. 2 of them were on an extension cord, and they were the ones that were freezing.

May not be related to your specific problem, but I thought I would share it anyway.

this could definitely be a contributing factor for me. I actualy have 1 powerstrip pluged into another for a total of 11 outlets and my wifi ap pluged into 1 wall outlet and it's on a 15amp circut.