hi, i'm using slackware-current and have been getting random system freezes while using X. could anyone point me where should i start looking for logs/errors? btw i'm on a samsung laptop using i915 driver and KDE 4.6.4. thank you

log files are ussually in /var/log

i would look at /var/log/messages and /var/log/messages.1

and the command 'dmesg'

for starters

from my experience random system freezes are nearly always hardware issues. I would recommend checking things like fans (especially on graphics cards), check the temps of motherboard heat sinks when a freeze occurs.

I've had a couple of moatherboards which just freeze randomly, one where the cooling fan on the northbridge failed, the other got very hot during long periods of use (transcoding etc).

It'd also be worth running the memory test utility found on most live cd linux distro's. Run these overnight and see if any errors occur.

I've experienced random lockups a few years back. It turned out it was the Power supply. I used a program to see the motherboards voltages and saw that the +12V was +5V. It took me about one motherboard and two processors to detect it. Luckily most of the expenses was covered, but I must have used nearly $200 on shipping back and forth that wasn't covered.

In the past, I have had problems with a program using more than one core at a time, and a segfault with the Opera browser's plugin (probably flash surprise surprise). Are you doing/using either one of these.

after few days of testing, i still can't figure out the cause. i can see the time whenever X freezes and i use it to refer back to the timeline in /var/log/messages but i couldn't find anything wrong. i first suspected it to be the cpu overheating, but then it locks up even at 57c, so that couldn't be the cause. how can i check the cpu/motherboard fans voltage,speed etc? at the moment i'm using conky as the system monitor

the i915 driver stack is notoriously unstable depending on video hardware and component versions. All I can suggest is to catch as much info as possible and open a bug report on bugs.freedesktop.org. But make sure it is not your RAM or power supply causing the trouble.

seems that it's much likely to freeze whenever i have kget open (3 times in a row now). i've been reading that sandy bridge chipsets have some issues under heavy IO and i'm assuming this might be the case. gonna try kernel 3.1 rc1 and see if there's any improvements

Try using the 'vesa' drivers for a while and see if it crashes.