Hardware :: Random Freezes In Ubuntu / Sabayon And Others
Jul 27, 2010
I had Linux Mint installed and it became subject to random freezes. The system was never under any serious strain at the times that this occurred. I went to the Ubuntu forums and discovered that this is a relatively common problem with Ubuntu and that there's no fix available. I tried almost all advice offered there, without any remedy. These included disabling Flash, Java, Compiz, Nvidia drivers etc etc.
I decided to try another distro. Since then I've had random freezes in Suse, Sabayon and even with a Fedora live disc. Oddly enough, I never have this issue with Win 7 (I dual boot). If this is a hardware problem, why does it never occur under Win 7? If it is, as I suspect a hardware issue, how can I identify the source of the problem and resolve it?
I've been using Ubuntu for a while now, and ever since I installed 10.10 (I did a clean install) I've been having problems with the computer completely locking up... nothing is responsive. I've not had this problem on any prior Ubuntu version. The problem started after I installed the updates for ubuntu... I have a hunch that its either the nvidia driver i installed or the latest kernel thats causing the problem. I'm using the proprietary driver for nvidia and my card is a GeForce6100 nForce 405... the kernel 2.6.35-22... as you can imagine its quite annoying having the computer lock up.. P.S.- the freezes aren't exactly random, they happen generally when I'm using high CPU %'s (e.g. when i import all my music at once to rhythmbox and playing spring rts)
At random times (approx. once a day), my whole ubuntu/gnome interface freezes. mouseover-animiations (for example on the icons in the taskbar) keep working, but clicking doesn't do anything anymore. On the keyboard, tab and arrows keeps working, but most other keys don't do anything. The only option seems to be to reboot. After that reboot everything is fine again (for a while)
Once the freeze happens, it freezes both the standard ubuntu panels but also the program I have open at that moment. It doesn't seem to be connected to a specific program I run.
Is there some log, or anything else that I can use to figure out where these freezes are coming from?
I've been using rTorrent for a good two years now, and it's been running smoothly until about 6 months ago when random crashes and freezes would occur, between once per day and once per week. (I think it freezes if I run in screen, and crashes if I run it directly.) I've updated both rtorrent and libtorrent, updated cURL, and searched the internet near and far for a solution. I finally got this output (pastebin) after a crash today. I'm not sure how far up it goes, mainly because I'm not sure how I can scroll up the terminal window, and syslog doesn't seem to be of any help. Bottom line, I have no idea what rtorrent/libtorrent are doing, and random crashes are becoming very frustrating. For what it's worth I have a very large library (2000+) of shared files. Using version 9.04
I installed Ubuntu Lucid on my computer a few weeks ago (fresh install, formatted). But recently I've been having some problems.
This is about the 4th time it happens. When I randomly open a program, sometimes the whole computer will just freeze. I can't change to a terminal window with Ctrl-Alt-F1,2,3,4 or anything. I can only press the Reset button on the computer case. This is frustrating because I already lost ALL my firefox settings and addons and I don't want anything like this to keep on happening.
The problem was: *drumroll* the POWER SOURCE.
Apparently the voltage was having little drops and this caused all the hardware to freeze. This caused the system operation to be WORSE after I bought the new graphics card (since it was bigger and needed more power). I bought a new powersource and installed it and it seems everything is alright now.
I currently have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 running on my Asus laptop. I decided to install Ubuntu 10.10 along side Windows, as I will need it for work. It was installed via side-by-side and re-sized the partition
The installation of Ubuntu was flawless and works great, but now when I boot to Windows, its will randomly freeze, sometimes in 1 minute, sometimes within 10 minutes.
The only way I can solve this issue, is to either perform a disk scan from windows or restore the MBR.
The disk scan works, and Windows run fine, although If I boot Ubuntu again, run that for awhile, then boot windows again the problem returns.
Restoring the MBR works as well, though without a dualboot, its useless
I have also tried EasyBCD and replaced GRUB with Windows boot manager, though same problems.
i am, many people out there using Ubuntu 10.10 (or 10.4) have been experiencing seemingly random freezes. Whereby the system freezes and responds to absolutely no input. If you have been having a similar issue perhaps you could post in this thread and we could try and establish some commonalities. Perhaps its hardware, software, drivers or some combination. I have a Dell Inspiron 1300, with a Pentium M 2.10ghz CPU. I have experienced freezes with and without Compiz running and even in Openbox sessions.
I have an HP dx5150 with Ubuntu 11.04. I recently added 2 new memory chips (total 4) with the same specifications as the originals. The memory is recognized by the BIOS and Memtest returns no errors. The computer boots normally and functions normally for an hour or so, and then freezes. When it freezes it does not accept any input and the screen gets displays a bunch of small green or purple lines. Here is the output from lshw:
i've been running Kubuntu 11.04 for a couple weeks now and trying to transition away from windows but i have had this problem with seemingly random system freezing and crashing i run kubuntu 11.04 64bit on a dell studio 1558 with a core i5, intel hd graphics, and 6gb ram.
my laptop after awhile will just freeze and all i can do is a hard reset, sometimes the screen will go black with a bunch of text, but i think that only happens when virtualbox is running b/c i can sometimes get back to the desktop, but it will freeze nevertheless (i run win7 in vbox for certain things i need like itunes and office).. i do notice that my laptop is getting pretty warm, but i don't know if that's related b/c it always did under windows
I got Ubuntu 11.04 on my USB and I booted from it for the first time, worked fine. I went back and it started to flicker and freeze then come back and the rez was stuffed.
I'd been using karmic for ages with no probs. I did a fresh install of lucid when it came out and installed compiz and cairo-dock. Rather annoyingly my computer started to completely freeze. I couldn't get a shell up, I couldn't ssh from another machine and the sysrq keys didn't work (the fan picked up speed almost immediately). The freezing didn't seem to follow any pattern and wasn't happening when accessing the dock. I decided to disable compiz (and cairo-dock) to see if this helped. It did! I reintroduced compiz with no problems, but as soon as I introduced cairo-dock, I started to get the same problem.
I've not been able to find anything in the general logs to give any clues. ubuntu lucid
1st post @ LQ. Ubuntu user since 2007ish. Lots of PC experience... now vexed by upgrade from 9.10 Karmic to 10.04LTS Lucid.
The problem: random freezes whenever I boot into Lucid as user through usual Grub menu. The freeze sequence is: 1- screen stops, 2- mouse pointer freeze w/ no effect on click but moves freely and keyboard is useless, 3- screen blacks out for about 30 seconds and then returns but is unusable and 4- constant HDD activity for about 5-10 seconds. I have waited several minutes for a recovery of some sort but no dice. I reboot via on/off or reset button. Ubu deletes 2 inodes and then I'm off and running again.
If I boot through the recovery console there are no problems at all. The recovery console sequence: 1- select recovery from Grub menu, 2- at recovery menu select drop to root command prompt, 3- give root password, 4- enter 'gdm' at console prompt, finish boot up in my only user desktop (not root.)
I have not been able to find any log files that show an error message, but I'm not so tech oriented that I would necessarily know one if I saw one. Through many hours of browsing posts describing Lucid problems @ UbuntuForums (one of which has over 1,000 responses) I have found my '.xsession-errors' file (attached) is full of data.code...
It's been freezing on me like you wouldn't believe today, and I think it has something to do with the load put on the CPU by various sites. The trouble is, I need to access a few of these sites to do my work. WordPress is one of them. I've had to restart the computer five times via SysRq keys since when these freezes happen, I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace out of it (even with zap enabled) and I can't bring up a terminal or Alt-F2 to kill process. I can't switch processes, windows, or anything. Firefox just sits there and laughs at me as I threaten to bust the screen in half.
And the real funny thing is, people actually say this is a better browser than IE. I never had these problems on Windows.What can I do to stop this? Do I just have to switch to another browser?
I'm getting very random full system freezes with F13. The keyboard stops responding completely. Sometimes the mouse (and the mouse only) still works. I those cases, I can log in via ssh, kill kdm, and everything goes back to normal until the next freeze. However, in most cases, I have to do a hard reboot. Sometimes the system goes on for days without a problem, and sometimes it freezes 10 times in a day (It's in one of those days that the bug-screen saved me from flying out the window). I also had this problem on F12. I'm not sure if its video-driver related as both nvidia and nouveau experience this behaviour. In fact, I'm not at all sure what the cause may be.
My system just freezes randomly. It happens about once a day, which is really often imho. It usually happens when I'm watching a video in fullscreen and it suddenly stops. I can't alt-tab or escape out of fullscreen, my mouse doesn't work and the keyboard is unresponsive. I'm forced to restart by pressing my computer's power button. This happens in both vlc and kmplayer and it also happened a few times when i was not watching a video. I was just on firefox, browsing the internet.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Desktop Edition and most of the time I get these random freezes and then I have to turn off my computer and reboot it back on. It's getting really annoying because I am constantly downloading huge packs of data and it freezes and then I have to start re downloading...
I am in the process of trying to move my files from a windows 2003 install over to fedora 12 using the Fedora 12 x86_64 Live image.
After some initial problems with burning the ISO image (had to enable disk-at-once to get rid of I/O buffer errors). And a GPF in the xor_sse2 module while building my software raid 5 arrays (forced to reboot, unable to stop or restart the array) I finally managed to create a single LVM volume group ontop of it all.
Initially I ran some tests on the raid volume and wrote a large 100GB file filled with zeroes all over it to be sure that it was functioning normally. After that I proceeded to copy files over from the NTFS volume to the LVM volume. which resulted in lots of errors on my terminal and complete loss of the entire filesystem. Even a simple ls -l / resulted in "Bus Error" although the system still kept running for a few seconds, until it finally froze and spontaneously rebooted. Since then I ran memtest to be sure my memory is fine, and tried alternative ways of mounting the volumes, and copy methods. Each attempt resulted in either a complete freeze or instant reboot. After 6 reboots, I managed to copy 20GB out of 490GB. Obviously this will take forever this way.
/var/log/messages is unhelpful. There are a bunch of cryptic messages regarding ATA bus errors (mostly CRC errors it seems) and soft resets when the LVM volume get mounted, but everything functions fine until I touch the NTFS volume.
Here are some of them:
Code: Dec 22 02:32:15 localhost kernel: ata6.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 Dec 22 02:32:15 localhost kernel: ata6.00: BMDMA stat 0x4 Dec 22 02:32:15 localhost kernel: ata6.00: cmd ca/00:80:02:a5:fb/00:00:00:00:00/e7 tag 0 dma 65536 out
I'v been trying to install Ubuntu (and actually all other dists of linux (in hope of succes), but running ubuntu on my other machines and prefer it) on my old laptop. Laptop Acer Aspire 1312XC. Have just run a 24 hour RAM test it turned out ok. Have tried with other RAM blocks in aswell. The install freezes at random points in the installation. Mainly when trying to copy files to the hard drive. The only thing i've succeded in installing was Ubuntu server and windows XP. I have tried with ACPI off and all the other special atributes. No success so far.
HP Compaq 6820s: During the installation of F14 I noticed that the system freezes for a while every few seconds. The installed and rebooted laptop behaves the same way. Disturbing repeated messages in var/log/messages:
Code: Nov 3 18:20:22 localhost kernel: [ 512.589815] [drm:radeon_dvi_detect] *ERROR* DVI-I-1: probed a monitor but no|invalid EDID Nov 3 18:20:34 localhost kernel: [ 524.463172] [drm:drm_edid_block_valid] *ERROR* Raw EDID:
I am stumped. I get random "freezes" for like 20 seconds, then back to normal. Then again the same thing randomly. I thought it was my hard drive...replaced it, reinstalled 9.10 and same issue. Thought it might be the memory...nope!, thought it might be my motherboard, tried to update my bios and it froze and now I can't get in to my bios at all. I bought a new motherboard and did a fresh install of 9.10 and same problem!!! I took my hard drive out and put it in another computer and it ran the same ruling out hardware issues all together.
I'm working on setting up a computer lab for my kids' school, and am planning to use Ubuntu LTSP and Sabayon User Manager to lock things down.
When I edit a profile in Sabayon, and create the default desktop icons I'd like them to have (Firefox for example), when the user logs in the icon is generic and when clicked says:
"The application launcher Firefox.desktop is not marked as trusted. If this application launchers source is unknown to you then it may be unsafe to launch."
If I click "Mark as Trusted", the Firefox icon pops up and all is well. However whenever a new user logs in, they have to go through this process and I'm worried it may confuse them.
Why are application launchers created by Sabayon not trusted by my LTSP users?
Does anyone know of a good web page creator that is easy to install on Sabayon 5.3?? I'm new to Linux and web page creating, so be gentle! I have registered a web address and a host, now all I have to do is get the info to the world.
Thinking of putting sab alongside suze 11.3, I wonder if the bootloaders are compatible (versions of grub) or if only native systems (apart from windows/apple) are acceptable.
I'm in the process of trying Sabayon 5.2. After the initial install, I had 800 packages to install to upgrade - went very smooth - but on re-booting, the auto login was gone. No problem, I reset using 'run command' 'kdm' and the 'convenience' screen. Checked all the correct places, and re-booted - no auto login, and I can't get it to 'stick'?
I'm looking for a script that copies a random .jpg from a random folder in my ~/Pictures folder to my ~/temp folder with a standard filename. This file will then be displayed in Conky. I can fix the last part, but I cannot find a way to do the first part.
We are having a cluster with couple of disk servers, compute nodes and a head node. Disk server is nfs mounted on all the compute and head nodes. The problem is that if any of the disk servers hangs, it freezes rest of the cluster too which is dangerous. Ideally, cluster should not care about the hanged server and run without any problem except files from that server is not visible. Is there any way I could avoid the problem of freezing cluster because of one hanged server?
