Hi all,

I've been using 9.3 now for a while, but it's unusable, due to completely random
lockups/freezes. The problems started after a clean install of 9.3. The system crashes at completely random times (using KDE as window manager). When the systems freezes, I'm unable to switch to another runlevel, and the music hangs. I've downgraded the whole shit to suse 9.2, still the same problem... My Windows XP SP 2 doesn't show this kind of behaviour, so I think it isn't a problem with hardware. I've checked my memory though (no errors). I've installed today Fedora Core 3 with KDE 3.3, but the freezing problem was still there. Is it a problem with the kernel? With KDE? I dunno. I'm now quite desperate, because I absolutely don't now how to tackle this problem!

My specs:
AMD Athlon 64 2800+
1024 MB Ram
Sapphire Radeon 9600
Gigabyte K8VT800 Pro Mainbord

Thanks in advance,

Guuzjo

I'm assuming that you installed the 64 bit version of both SuSE and Fedora, if not I would say start there.

Assuming that is not the issue I would turn to looking up your hardware in SuSE's hardware Support Database

Which shows me one issue

Vendor Device Level of Support
------------------------------------------------------
Gigabyte K8VT800 Partially


I've come to realize that when a piece of hardware is listed as being only partially supported in the Hardware DB it usually means that it is going to take a great deal of work on your part to get it to work properly (if at all). I am not sure if there is a Hardware DB for Fedora but you should definitely look into it. Most people that have tried multiple disto's seem to agree that SuSE and Ubuntu have the best Hardware support and since SuSE 9.3 is such a recent release I would imagine that you will find that your MoBo is only partially supported under Fedora as well.


And you Radeon 9600 also stands out to me. ATI video cards do not have the best support in Linux, I've heard that it has gotten better but they can still be a pain to get set up properly. If you have not installed the 3D drivers (this also includes direct rendering) for your ATI card than if you system trys to run any program that requires those drivers it can severely slow it down or crash it, some of the screen savers that come with SuSE require direct rendering support and if you have not chosen a screen saver SuSE also defaults to randomly choosing one when the screen saver starts.

Also what type of programs are you running when the crashes happen, it could also be that the programs you run use a common library that is partially/fully corrupted, and as soon as the program calls for that library you have a crash.

Suse is a pretty stable distro and if you are suffering random lockups, the first thing I'd do would be inspect two likely suspects: overheating, and RAM. If you are running gkrellm, you should be able to view the system temperatures -- anything in the high 30's or low 40's Celsius is typical, on the other hand if you're in the mid 50's or higher, that's running too hot. As for testing RAM, memtest is the tool. I'd recommend letting it run for at least 3 or 4 full cycles. That may take a while, but it will give you confidence in the results.

Naturally, neither of these things may turn out to be the culprit, but you would at least be able to eliminate them from consideration. Good luck with it -- J.W.