Hi there

I've been running Suse 10.0 on my Compaq Presario R3000 laptop successfully for several months and upgraded to 10.2 about a month ago - again with no problems.

However, it keeps crashing all of a sudden. Twice its jumped out of GUI mode into text mode (init 3?) and now now worse. All of a sudden the screen goes dark and then NOTHING will bring it back. All the keys do nothing. The only way out of it is to hold down the power button until it turns off. It has crashed on me like this at least six times today.

I've never had this problem in Linux (plenty in Windows!) and have no idea what to look for or check.


Some possible relevant info:

Google Earth won't run any more. The initialisation screen comes up and there it stays. At which point the laptop starts to get hot and the fan runs overtime. You can usually stop this with the Kill command, but sometimes everything freezes up (no black screen this time) and none of the keys or mouse will work. One time the mouse still moved the cursor, but that was all.


The crashing problem USUALLY occurs when the laptop is not being used - ie I leave it to go and do something else for 10 mins or so, and then when I come back - the screen is black and its locked up.


I'm beginning to suspect hardware failure.... any ideas???? Where do I look for error logs?

Thanks

Try doing massive write on the disk (like writing any 10+ MB document) and leaving active terminal window maximized all over screen. When it 'freezes' try typing 'sync' - in this terminal window - blindfold, surely. If it works, you will notice - HDD will make lots of noise.

If it works, try running
xset dpms force on

(check Option "DPMS" in your xorg.conf!)

Thanks for the reply. However, EVERYTHING freezes up so I can't type anything in a terminal.

I thought about this some more though and changed the Powersave/screensaver settings so that the laptop no longer goes into standby mode. Since then I haven't had any crashes.

The GoogleEarth problem is still there though. It used to run but now it freezes the system solid and heats up the laptop big time. Odd that.

Standby? Maybe solution was 'Power button' + what I said, but I am not sure. If current state doesn't create problems, let it be.

About Google Earth - well, 'strace -o log -f gogleearth' on it can at least leave evidence what it did... Maybe it will help.