I have just installed SuSE 9.0, dual boot with win98 and it seems to lock up a lot, so far i have had to reboot while running xmms, gnu-cash, konquerer, and this morning i even found the computer froze after just sitting all nite with no open applications. I've only been running one app at a time as I'm mostly trying to get used to new OS and feeling my way around, but unsure how to even begin troubleshooting this. When it locks i am unable to open console session, close the app, etc.

Kernel is 2.4.21-99, 512 mb ram, pentium IV 2.8 HT processor, asus p4s800 board.

Anybody have any ideas where to start?

Thanks
Matt

Was the hardware reliable when you were running just Win98? <dig at MS omitted>

I recently fixed a randomly-freezing computer by replacing the memory. Can you get any repeatable crashes?

The most consistent I can get is running xmms, that usually seems to lock me up w/in 5 minutes. Believe it or not, my win98 has been fine so far (i'd be much happier if it was the other way around, like it should be....)

So it's probably not a hardware problem. That's good, because it means you can probably fix it for free.

The bad news is that I have no intelligent suggestions to make.

Anything funny happen during the install?

no, the install went quite smooth, as it did on an older computer i have, which (of course), is running great. (just really slow compared to my new one....)

Try looking at your syslogs and the logs related to whatever app you are running. That would probably be the best place to start. Another place to check might be the hardware compatibility list for your distro. It is very possible that you may have had a smooth install, but the hardware may not be compatible. Some things to look at are 1) How did you do your partitioning? Are the two OS's separated by something or are they mixed in together? 2) Could there be any IRQ conflicts that would cause it to lock up? Check on those things and repost.

Its, most likely, a power management issue. Check to see if you have apm, acpi or any of the other power management options enabled in the kernel that may be causing these lockups. It could be that you have acpi on and when your system detects it and tries to utilize, it just doesn't work with your hardware so it freeks out and stops altogether.

rberry88

In the SuSE documentation, it says to disable ACPI by putting bezeichneracpi=off in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Don't know much about power management but tried it anyway and so far the system has been more stable. THANK YOU for pointing me in the right direction. It seemed like 20 minutes of no activity would lock me up, today I had it lock up a couple of times in GNOME but my KDE has been OK every time so far <keeping fingers crossed>. memtest86 passed also.

I think my xmms/sound issue is unrelated as xmms will still hang on me after 2-6 minutes of playing time. It doesn't take everything down with it anymore, but the system is very slow even after I kill all 6 instances of it using ctrl-esc. So I know what I'll be researching on a Saturday nite.

As far as hardware, most everything I have is in the SuSE hardware database. My setup:
Asus P4s800 mobo
PIV 2.8 HT processor
512 mb DDR/400 RAM
WD 120 GB hd
Asus 52x CD-ROM
Sony DRU510AK DVD+-RW
Creative Labs SoundBlaster 128 PCI sound card
MSI MX/400 video card
Onboard sound disabled
KDS X-7b monitor

I did not look for the cd/dvd players as I have read that anything "standard" would work OK. The monitor is not listed but a similar model (XF-70) is listed and appeared to have the same specs.

I'm such a noob, I'm still not sure where to find log files, else I would have read (and posted) them...

Thanks again for the help, any sound suggestions would be appreciated (I *think* i have ALSA installed but still looking into all that).

ohhhhhhhhhhhh crap, i lied. when i actually start doing stuff, it still locks up on me. arrrrggghhhhhhhhh

The logs are located in /var/log . There are a few different flavors. I think I would start by looking at secure, messages, and boot.logs and make sure everything looks ok. You can look at the logs by typing cat "logname" | more. Substitute "logname" for whatever log you want to look at. I think you will have to be logged in as root to do this so if you are signed in as a regular user type "su -" (no parenthesis) and then type in the password. Don't forget to hit "ctrl d" to exit when you are done. Otherwise you leave the box in a precarious situation. Anyway, look through the logs and see if you can find out what might be causing your problem. If you have to, log in and type "tail -f /var/log/logname" and it will show you real time what is being logged to that particular log. You might try the above procedure and then re-creating the problem and then checking the logs to see what it says. Good luck and re-post if you can't locate and we'll try to help some more.

I went into BIOS and turned off the hyper-threading feature, and re-installed SuSE, and so far it has not locked up on me. The install still loaded the SMP kernel tho. Does this seem like a logical fix?? Not using HT doesn't bother me but I didn't really think it would solve anything...

After that I noticed that I could play music with the cd-rom, but could not see any data thru the dvd-rom. I have to run the mount command everytime first, is this normal?

And finally, when I try to mount the floppy drive, I get "I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified". (I have a blank floppy in the drive).

fstab output:

woody@linux:~> cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=iso8859-1,code=437 0 0
/dev/hda2 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0


I am starting to feel a lot better about this, thank you again for all the help!

Where is power management located in MDK 9.2? I looked in the control panel but saw nothing of power management.

First: If you have a P4 with hyperthreading (ht) make sure that the kernel supports this. I suggest you to use a 2.6.x-kernel because ht-support of a 2.4-kernel is poor.

I have had the same problems as you and belive I spend several nitghts with this problem. My solution at the end was to switch to Mandrake 10 which came originally with a 2.6 kernel. Maybe if you try to install a 2.6 kernel for SuSE it should work but you have no guarantee.

Second: Turn off the plug-and-play option in your BIOS.

Good luck