Programs & comaputer freezing
 

As the title says my system has been freezing all day, if I manage to close programs I cannot open them again unless I reboot my system.

I was going to try to update my system to see if that would help but the following message popup in the terminal.

Can someone tell me what it is and possibly what may be wrong with my system? I'm using Slackware 13.37 xfce and have not changed or updated my system in anyway.

Can anyone help please? Slackware is not showing up in grub anymore. :(

check dmesg
i'm suspecting a hardware failure over there

Run memtest86 if possible.

If you can't, try removing one of the RAM sticks and see if it helps (with the computer powered down, obviously). If it doesn't work, try the other RAM stick. If you have only one RAM stick, then try one that you might have lying around.

Other possibilities include thermal, i.e. a failed CPU fan or a gunked-up heatsink under the fan.

Or a failing power supply, an issue which tends to imitate memory problems until the supply fails completely.

Currently running memtest86 v4.0 and there seems to be over 10000 errors, how would I fix them and how would I distinguish which RAM stick is causing the problem assuming it is the RAM?

Take one out, run test, then repeat with the other should tell you which RAM is bad. If they both show up bad, try them in another PC if possible because it could be your motherboard.

150000+ errors now, am currently testing each stick separately. Now errors so far, dont think testing the RAM in another PC is an option, only have the 1 here.

Found the culprit, it was a RAM stick and the others seem to be fine. Download to 5GB now :(

Slackware disappeared from my Grub menu list so I booted into Fedora and ran "grub2-mkconfig -o boot/grub2/grub.cfg" to recreate the grub.cfg file, that has picked up Win7 and Fedora but not slackware.

I run "os-prober" and get What does that mean and how can I get Grub to show all my distros/OSs?

The bad thing about having a faulty RAM is that it sometimes doesn't have visible consequences (like error-messages or crashes) at first, but nonetheless corrupts the filesystem or the files on the disk, especially when installing/upgrading programs. In that case even a backup made earlier can be useless, just because it also may be corrupted. I would recommend to re-install to have a known-good system. Just my personal opinion.

Make sure to run 'fsck' on the partition that you were trying to boot, probably the slackware partition.

Also, make sure the RAM is still in dual-channel mode or triple-channel with newer Intel systems. You need sets of RAM sticks of equivalent sizes in the respective memory banks. See the manual or wiki.

Why is this so hard??? Everything seems to be running fine now apart from the audio, I have no sound. I try configuring via "alsaconf" but it doesn't want to work.

I have a Xonar D2X sound card which was working perfectly fine first, grrr just want to take out the card and throw it away with my speakers.

First, make sure all output channels are unmuted in 'alsamixer'.

Don't run alsaconf. It's only for ISA cards.

BTW, I also am going through the process of testing all my RAM sticks one by one, and the first one I tested turned out to be bad too. Memtest just froze when the "pass" percentage reached 31%. I had assumed that the lockups I'd been getting were the fault of NVidia's Linux drivers. And then I got a "write to invalid memory location" bluescreen in Windows..

You might have a second sound device (like the HDMI port on a video card). You can check with "alsamixer" to see which is loaded. Also running "alsaconf" can tell you how many are detected and will allow you to select one (1). Check lsmod to see if the module is loading. If you had any file system corruption, you might have to delete all sound file configs and start over.

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(1) Sorry, dugan, alsaconf is not just for ISA cards. It detects my PCI Soundblaster cards just fine.