Crashing tips?

[Mitch Wiedemann]

Great questions!

Here's what I'd do:
BACKUP MY DATA!  (That's always my first step.)
read /var/log/messages
read /var/log/Xfree86.0.log
read /var/log/yum.log

Try using the generic video driver again.
Your comment about it freezing when you've clicked leads me to believe 
that your XF68Config may be messed up.  Perhaps try copying your 
existing XF68Config file to a backup location, and then using the 
display config. application to set vanilla defaults, and see if the 
situation doesn't improve.

You didn't mention if you had logged out of your Window manager at the 
end of the day before it froze overnight.  If not, try logging out, or 
even "/sbin/telinit 3" to stop the Xfree86 server altogether, and see if 
it still freezes at night.

Best of luck.  HTH.

Matt Morgan wrote:

> I'm fishing for some ideas about where to start diagnosing a 
> mostly-random crashing problem.
>
> First off, let me say this is a 2.8Ghz hyperthreading pentium 4, 512 
> Mb of DDR400 ram, an Asus motherboard (not sure of the exact model), a 
> WD 80 gb drive, and a Sony CRX225 CD-RW. I have a 3COM 3C905b 100baseT 
> network card (there's also an SiS adapter built-in that I don't use), 
> and an ATI Radeon 9200SE video adapter. The sound built-in to the 
> motherboard appears to be a SiS i810_audio.
>
> This is a fairly new computer for me, I've had it maybe 10 days. I've 
> only been a Fedora user for about a week more than that (temporarily 
> used a different computer before getting this one). For a couple days 
> after installing FC1 on this computer, it ran very well, except that I 
> couldn't get XFree86 to deal properly with the video; it would only 
> work on Generic VESA, not with the Radeon 9200 driver. Then I set up 
> yum and turned on nightly updates; the next morning the computer 
> froze, just after login, while KDE was starting up. During rebooting, 
> kudzu found the video adapter and set it up for me. So now all the 
> hardware is properly identified and working, and I thought, great! 
> That's worth one measly crash.
>
> Only the thing is, now it tends to crash a lot. Almost every day 
> since, the computer is either frozen when I come to work in the 
> morning, or freezes during KDE startup, just after I login. Then less 
> often, it just freezes in the middle of working. For example, it froze 
> when I tried to tell Firefox 0.8 to use gpdf instead of xpdf to open a 
> pdf--just clicking on the "Other ..." button froze everything. Then 
> this morning, it froze in the middle of typing an email message in 
> Thunderbird 0.5.
>
> I wanted to blame it on yum, thinking it didn't happen until I set up 
> nightly yum updates. But it happens even during mornings that yum 
> installed nothing overnight. So that seems like a red herring.
>
> My primary goal in diagnosing this problem is not just to fix this one 
> computer. I plan to switch my entire organization to linux over the 
> next couple years, and I need to get a better idea of how to diagnose 
> crashing on linux desktops. So my real question is: when your computer 
> crashes, what tools, and what steps, do you use to diagnose the 
> problem(s). You know, what log files, what common culprits, etc. Of 
> course, if you have specific suggestions about how to fix this 
> particular computer, I'm all ears for that, too.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Matt

-- 

Mitch Wiedemann
mc Computer Consulting
mc2 at lightlink.com
http://www.lightlink.com/mc2