Hello all,

I am running Debian with the 2.6.8 kernel. I have run Debian in the past with no difficulties at all. This current installation is casuing me serious issues however. I already have a mound of data and files on it, so I am hoping to fix these problems without performing the classic windows fix (reformat and start fresh). I am running a dual boot system with another OS, so I know these aren't hardware issues. Here are some of the major problems I'm having:

1. The greatest annoyance - Everything seems to run fine for the first few minutes. Then my system starts to hang. Particularly whenever I try to open the K panel (or gnome for that matter), konqueror, or browse my filesystem. Sometimes it hangs for about 5 min, and other times it goes so long I have to kill the process.

Sometimes it will hang when I try to download something and Firefox attempts to open the "Download File" window. I have a wireless network and am using NDISwrapper to get my NIC working. I'm not sure if this is related to the hang issue. I haven't noticied any particular pattern though.

This phenomenon happens regardless of whether I use GNOME or KDE. Could it be an issue with X? I know that when I log in for a terminal session only, it doesn't act up at all, but that doesn't really tell me anything.

2. My soundcard simply refuses to work. I have an SB Live card that works fine on my other OS. I have the right driver installed, and attemted to configure it the same way I have in the past, but no go.

3. Dmesg and my log files have become virtually useless to me. Don't get me wrong, I am sort of a newb. I have uses dmesg to diagnose issues in the past with great sucess. For some reason I simply haven't been able to derive any usefull information regarding these problems from them this time. I DO notice that a few error messages appear during boot, but these don't seem to be recorded anywhere. Of course, this output moves entirely too fast for me to read. It seems to say that "pcichp can't be loaded" and "schchp can't be loaded" and something about my soundcard being "blacklisted."

Like I said, I am relatively new to Linux. Some of these issues I simply don't understand. I've searched the internet for hours looking for information and have come up with nothing useful. If anyone out there could help me in any way, I would really appreciate it. I really don't want to have to rely solely on "That Other Operating System." Thank you in advance!

Hmmm, if it was hanging during long terminal sessions I might suggest a bad memory stick, but as you say that's all fine then perhaps it is X that's the problem. Perhaps a reinstall of X? As you're on debian you could always remove it using dpkg and reinstall using apt-get or something? Hopefully your important data is on a separate home partition.