Mandrake constantly freezes

Him · 04-09-2005, 08:45 AM

Hello. I am having a problem with Mandrake 10.1, I dont now if its the X Server or the actual kernel. Sometimes, randomly every 10 minutes or even 15 hours, Mandrake totally freezes. Numlock wont respond, CTRL+Alt+F5 wont work either. Simply, nothing works except the mouse which I can still move, but thats the only thing and then I need to plug off the PC. Last time it froze a blue line appeared while running FireFox and bang it crashed. And as I typed this, the area where you can select desktops turned totally black and the colors got dissorted. That blank box also covered the lower part of FireFox.

I am running KDE 3.2,
Celeron 566MHZ, 128MB SDRAM, GeForce 2 MX 400 (I am using the generic drivers that Mandrake provides though). One 160GB 7200RPM Maxtor HD with a smaller 9GB 7200 FireBall HD, and the PC is a Dell Dimension L566Cx.

Any clues? Thanks for any help guys!

Mega Man X · 04-09-2005, 09:01 AM

I had a similar problem a few years back. It turns out that the inbuilt network card was bringing the system down, randomly.

I'd recommend you to debug your system by looking into your log files at /var/logs and disabling inbuilt stuff from your BIOS one by one until you find what is causing the system to crash.

A cheap D-Link network card for 15 bucks fixed my PC

Him · 04-09-2005, 09:28 AM

Actually, I dont have a network card =P. I am still in the old age with a 56K modem -_-. Anyway, I checked my log, and the only 2 things I found weird were:

Apr 9 09:45:40 localhost kernel: keyboard.c: can't emulate rawmode for keycode 240

Apr 9 10:01:00 localhost CROND[4199]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)

As far as I know...I dont remember having a Cron command run hourly. And:
------------------------
Apr 9 06:01:00 localhost CROND[9435]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Apr 9 07:01:00 localhost CROND[9474]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Apr 9 08:01:00 localhost CROND[9513]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Apr 9 09:01:00 localhost CROND[9599]: (root) CMD (nice -n 19 run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Apr 9 09:12:08 localhost syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
---------------------------

That above happened around the last time Linux crashed. Well, the last 2 lines. See, its running some kind of Cron command every hour at :01 minutes. I absolutely have no clue where did that come from, but I am checking. Clues anyone?