Linux hangs
 

Hi,

I have the MDK 8.2 distro. I have had it installed on a PC that ran W2K for 6 months witout a hitch.
I have had it installed for 2 days and have had 4 hangs in that
time. It has hung twice while the mobnitor was on powersave
mode, had to hit the reset button. It has also hung while not
doing anything in particular during the day.

Is there some sort of log that might give me a hint at why it is
hanging?
The only clue I have had so far was that when Galeon
(? right name) in GNOME recovered it said it had not exited
correctly.

Thanks

David

So you are in Gnome when it hangs? Are you running any specific programs or it just randomly does this? Maybe your system doesn't like to go to sleep (powersave mode). You can disable this by going to K--Configure--Power---Energy (or something very similar to that). Then uncheck the box at the top that says to use power saving features.

I can be in Gnome or KDE. I have a switch box for kb/mouse and monitor and if I am switched into my other box and return Ioften have a hang then too (always if the linux box has gone into powersave). I have been just moving the mouse and it has hung. I always lose all kb input, so left ALT+SysReq + r etc. do not work.

Before my upgrade to MDK 8.2 from MDK 8.0 on the exact same box I never had a hang. So it has got to be something different in the config, the main difference has been the setting up of the USB ADSL modem support, maybe that is it?

I think my only option is a clean install.

David

I use the mandrake 8.2 too, and at first my system
froze in, a few times, mainly because the Amd processor
and the Nvidia drivers seemed to conflict.
After adding mem=nopentium in lilo and rebuilding the
nvidia src.rpm's and putting the extra options in XF86config-4
my system is rock stable. :)
Oh and i use the gdm instead of kdm inlog as it sometimes
brings you back in runlevel 3.
Maybe you can also use memtest86 to check your
memory as linux uses it in a different way compared
with M$ products.

I suspect that it is Xfree86 that is hanging, not Linux. A good way to test this is to switch to a non graphical console.

Do this by doing a Ctrl-Alt-F2, then letting it sit in the text console for awhile. Note that the screen will blank after awhile as a screen saver, hit any key to get it back. You can use Alt-F8 (or Alt-F-somthing, I can't remember what it was for Mandrake) to switch back to your graphical screen.

You can shut down the graphical mode completely by issuing an "init 3" at a command prompt. "init 5" takes you back into the X graphical interface.

While at runlevel 3 (the "init 3" thing), you can start X without any thing else by entering "X" at the prompt. You will just get an ugly blank screen with a mouse cursor. Use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to exit.

If it does turn out to be "X", tell us what kind of video card you have. Some of the Xfree86 video drivers (often the ones from 3rd party vendors) are not very stable, especially with all the fancy acceleration turned on.

If it does turn out to be Linux (which would be very rare) than maybe your computer has a power management scheme enabled (in BIOS), that your Linux is not configured to be compatible with.

Hi,

I did the memtest86 thing and all is OK with the RAM. I also left it in runlevel 3 overnite after doing the Ctrl-Alt-F2 thing. It had hung, no response from the kb or anything, reset button time. By the way it was Ctrl-Alt-F9 to return to X.

'init 3' did not work saying there was no command by that name or similar.

I have a SIS Video card using theh SIS 6326 chipset and a Unisys EVG-174-COL monitor which seem to be correctly configured in the XFConfig86-4 and XFConfig86 files (whats the difference here?). It does have an option in th eDevice section with a <. Option "noaccel"> (my brackets here, not in file)

I tried the 'mem=nopentium' in lilo.conf, but it is not a legal option? Not sure where it is supposed to go?

Another question too. Even though I have a Duron 800 and 384MB of RAM the machine is quite a bit slower than at do normal thiongs (like opening files, starting applications) than when it had W2K on it. Is this normal? Should I bulild a kernel specific to the AMD Duron, will it make a big difference? Even when I had my ADSL modem connected it was much slower loading pages I load all the time on my W2K box?


Thanks

David

Wow, so you are seeing performance decrease across the board then? loading pages shouldn't be any different, that should be a hardware bottleneck not an OS issue...

Rebuilding the kernel will help, and quite a bit (at least that has been my experience). And about that option in lilo... who cares if it's illegal, do it anyway, you will feel good breaking the law. he he he. j/k Did you type 'lilo' or '/sbin/lilo' at a bash prompt after tampering with it? That option appears to be working elsewhere, although I haven't tried it on my box yet.

And what browser were you using, maybe you should try out a few, I bet you will find one that will load pages as fast/faster than you were experiencing in W2K. If you are not into the GUI thing, or when you are browsing "type only" style sites (such as this one) then you may want to try a Console based browser like Lynx. Lightning compared to anything else.

If you do decide to recompile the kernel, a few pointers:
Check on your most frequently used software afterwards, see if they have an AMD version. It will work better, be more optimized for your processor that way.
Be prepared for a few obstacles, but do not worry, they are easily fixed, you may not even see any.
If you get to a point that you just cannot deal with after the kernel recompile, revert back to the old one. At least you know it's working right? (this of course will mean that you SHOULDN'T overwrite your current kernel with the reconfigured one, simply allow them to co-exist and make the entries in lilo).

Well, good luck (I know very little about video cards, sorry I can't help ya on that one).

Ok for that option mem=nopentium in lilo;
put it after append= " mem=nopentium "
and don't forget to run lilo afterwards ;)
As i said its great with Nvidia problems and X
don't know if its good for other instability.
One has to be root to init or telinit into other
runlevels
And to speed up your config, shoot off all
the unnecessarily startup services. And
yes recompiling the kernel is a major
speed improvement :p

I have this exact same problem with my switchbox. It will do it everytime if I'm in X. It won't do it at the text console. Therefore I expect the problem is in X. I haven't looked into it yet.

Hi,

I did a fresh install and it hung after about 1 hour.

So I ran memtest86 for a much longer period and it found a memory error!

So I am sifting through various DIMMs I have to find out which ones are OK and I expect that with the few tips I have learned here that I should have a reliable Linux server running.

So thanks.

David