Frozen Laptop
 

Hello, I recently re-installed debian on my laptop. I've had debian on my laptop before and there was no issue. But this time I installed from a the full installation disc instead of a live disc. Shortly after running and set up the same settings I had before my laptop froze while I was on the browser. Seeing that I can't type or move my mouse I decided to do a force shutdown. I'm am tempted to just wipe and reinstall to see if it'll fix the problem but I want to attempt to troubleshoot to see the source of the issue. I only change some very minor things, added the main repository, caffeine, and after initial freeze mplayer2/smplayer. It only happens when my laptop stays on for a while. I also disabled screensaver and changed the monitor sleep time to 20 minutes.

Edit: forgot to mention I am running debian classic mode (feels similar to gnome 2 really like it better than fedora and opensuse).

The first thing that came to my mind is simply to "steam" it or use hot-air blower to unfrozen. :) (joke.)

Try kill the screensaver daemon and leave the unit idle for a while. See if it freezes again.

lol I used the hot-air blower method.:p

Thanks I killed the screensaver daemon and also disbabled the startup for the screensaver. I don't know why it's causing it to freeze but I left alone for about an hour and came back to check and it seems to be fine now.
Is there something different from live installation then the installation image? It seems to started causing problems after I re-installed used the installation image.

Edit: frozed again. I previously checked those log before I decided to post anything.

Maybe

/var/log/syslog

or

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

or

/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

or

/var/log/dmseg

whew, may show something that strikes a match/idea.

OK. I had issues with suspend and hibernate on my laptop, and delved into the whole shebang a bit.

First off, I prefer ubuntu and friends for desktops - Mint in my case. More work has gone into the sordid details of what users want.

Secondly the issues of what happens under power saving modes, suspend and hibernate, is icky in the extreme.

I suspect the lappiue is configured to do powersaving on idle or even hibernate or suspend.
POwersaving is at three levels.

1/. Underclock te CPU, turn the backlight off and probably that's it
2/. Halt the CPU and kill the graffix, and just feed enough power to keep the RAM alive.
3/. Swap all the memory out to disk and shut the machine down, so essentially you reboot to 'where you were'

Now this is all fine and dandy, but what about some hardware? Graphics cards have their own memory..and they need special calls to reload. Nvidia legacy drivers simply do not work right coming out of suspend. So if there is special hardware in the lappie that may need fiddling with various low level parameters to get it back FROM suspend or whatever.

This isn't the answer, but it may help ID where to look for it.

Another log to check is /var/log/messages.

This is a crazy long shot, but, if it freezes with the screen still readable, try opening a terminal and running top and letting it run. If it freezes, top might show a snapshot of what was going on at the time of the freeze.

I think I have a clue. I previously, in the live disc installation, disable screen blanking because I was attempting to use a not use a program to help resolve blanking while watching youtube. This time after I reinstalled debian I didn't create a script to disable the screen blanking. If that's not the issue my only other thought was I disabled some function using xfce power manager. I was attempting to use xfce power manager as my main power manager but I removed it before I made any real changes to the system.
Edit: I came to this conclusion because it feels as if the screen is trying to go off but some how cause an issue in the proccess. Especially when I am running the browser with caffeine and the whole screen freezes. ( freezes even when it screen turns off too.)

Frankbell I will attempt that as well. The logs currently don't see anything wrong with the laptop when it freezes. Matter of fact it will think nothing happened and only log the shutdown proccess. Even though nothing is movable (mouse, window, and etc). So it seems like the linux is proccessing while the screen freezes but not the system.

Ok so I gave up on trying to troubleshoot the problem and just wipe it and installed using the debian live disc. After 12 hours I have not seen a freeze. So consider this post as solve.