I am experiencing hangs with a new pc. Most of the time the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock are flashing. What is theis supposed to indicate?

When I reboot and check the temp of the CPU it is at 58C which makes me supicisous that it is a heat related issue.

I also experienced wierd things like top not running. Just hangs and locks the terminal with no output. ps would do the same thing.

Sometimes X would hang but I would get the flashing lights. I ssh'd in from another pc and X was totally gone.

I am running nforce chipset with and AMD 2000. It is an MCI board with onboard nVidia video. I also have a tnt pci video card for xinerama.

d./

You are having kernel panics. When the kernel panics, it will often
(always?) send a message to the keyboard LEDs to blink. If your
kernel is new enough, it may even be talking to you in Morse code.
It's likely related to hardware, and your CPU temperature could be
the problem, but there are other possibilities. . .

Gidday!

Well, that's a lot of possible reasons, in general
the two flashing LEDs mean that the box is "dead",
one of the few occasions a linux-box dies.

The possible causes would be hardware failure,
poorly written drivers.

This leads to a follow-up question:
What distro are you running, what kernel version,
what's the exact name of your motherboard ... ?

Cheers,
Tink

I have the latest kernel from redhat up2date.

I compiled by nVidia kernel and nforce drivers using the kernel source from up2 date.

How can I debug a kernel panic?

Does it actually identify some sort of error in morris code?

d./

I believe it outputs the same information a screen dump would.
However, I'm not an expert on kernel panics . The usual way to
figure out what is causing a panic is start eleminating potential
causes. You could start by removing all nonessential hardware,
(also don't install the modules necessary for that hardware), and
go forward from there. I don't know what up2date does, but you
might try just downloading the kernel source from www.kernel.org
and compiling the kernel for yourself. I've found RH to be very
unreliable, especially when it comes to their kernel modifications.

You're usin an AMD, it aint the heat. Those babies run hot and come back for more (I almost fried my 1333 once...didnt realize my mobo stopped giving power to the HSF till I smelled the burning plastic. It still works, fast as always)

58 is above average for a case-modding OCing geek like me, but my bro's athlon 1ghz has been running at near 70 everyday for a year and a half.

I'd brush up on my morse code if I were you

-triffid

btw i'm in class right now, been repressed all day and had to have a lil fun.

This happened to me with the latest redhat installed the other day, after I had already been using it successfully for a week or so. I also have XP installed on the same machine. Not knowing that is was a kernel panic indication (in my instance the numlock and scroll lock LEDs blinked on and off in unison) I though I might have a virus, so I booted to XP and googled the problem, which led me here.

When I booted back into Redhat the problem went away and has not happened since then.

The only thing that was different about my booting into Linux the day that the problem occurred was that my the machine had been turned off for a day or so, and it has never been turned off for anywhere near that length of time before. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the latest linux (mine is 2.6.25-xxx) may check for CPU temperature on some motherboards that it really should not be checking it on.