System Freezes in 11.3
 

Hello -

I'm having an issue where my system freezes randomly and I have to restart. I have this installed on an HP p6320y desktop computer that also has Windows 7 installed.

I'm still rather new to Linux, so I'm rather limited in my knowledge of what it could be or where to even look to figure out what's going on. Please let me know what information you need (and how to obtain it, as I'm still learning Linux) in order to help you help me figure out what's going on. Thanks!

Restart doesn't necessarily mean reboot in Linux. If your desktop environment has frozen, instead of reboot, try ctrl+alt+backspace to restart the X server. Then login. It much faster than reboot.

To try to find out what is going on, try these:
1) click on the image of the monitor in your taskbar to open a terminal window. Enter this command: dmesg | tail -n 50
That will display the last 50 lines of messages from the dmesg output. Look for any reported errors.

2) In a terminal window, su to root (enter the comand su. You will be prompted for the root password.) Then enter this command: less /var/log/messages | tail -n 50
That will show you the last 50 lines of the messages log. Look for reported errors.

That's a start. Where to go from here depends on what you find out.

Good luck.

Thanks for the reply. I know it's been several weeks, but things have been so hectic that I've tried to stick to Windows on the few chances I've been able to relax so I didn't have to worry about this. I've tried Linux a little here and there in between, and I've had mixed results. I will let you know, however, that the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace trick did not work for me. Apparently, my system becomes COMPLETELY inoperable.

Because of forced to having to totally reboot, sorting to the last 50 seems to only give me boot up information, so I figured I need to go back farther in the logs. I copied and pasted the info into text files, since less didn't seem all that user friendly to me. Unfortunately, there's so much in here, and I don't know what I'm looking for. If one of you could take a look, I would appreciate it. If it's too much, I understand.

dmesg is in its entirety, but it appears to be only from the last startup, so having to reboot, so I'm not sure how much help that one will be. for /var/log/messages, I only did the log as of today, so hopefully it'll be easier to find an issue in there.

Please let me know what you find. Thanks!!