Blue screen of death

JB jb.123abc at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 27 16:05:37 UTC 2010


Alex <mysqlstudent <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> As if to say, "F"-you, the screen changed from my normal desktop, with
> Firefox, Azureus, a few terminals, and a few VMs running, to a solid
> blue screen with just the Fedora squiggly 'F' in the middle of the
> screen, and the whole computer locked up.
> ...
Hi,
I have had a couple of similar experiences with repeating pattern:
- F13 with Gnome
- system with what I consider acceptable CPU (Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor),
  Intel graphics (well supported), RAM and swap for my average daily tasks
  Mem:    760192k total,   710384k used,    49808k free,    50372k buffers
  Swap:  1171760k total,     6080k used,  1165680k free,   479000k cached
- always Firefox open with at least 5-8 tabs
  I suspect it to be the main source of instability:
  - directly
    I happened to visit some sites that were so "intensely heavy" in content
    that they could literally lock the FF (and the machine) for good. Perhaps
    the cause was HTML plus JavaScript plus intentionally "cleverly" coded
    pages (I even had Java Runtime turned off) that apparently FF could not
    process smoothly.
    I think FF should quickly move to tabs and other processes separation as
    Google Chrome did.
  - indirectly
    I visited a very popular site with a small Java applet that on a first
    time startup almost regularly knocked the FF down; I passed its URL to FF
    devs).
    Java environment is a hog and a cause of instability, still.
- complete lockup, could not open xterm to kill some process, no reaction to
  CTL-Alt-Backspace, could move cursor only. 
  For that reason I added to my panel the "bomb" app (Force a misbehaving
  application to quit) to get access to my desktop system (I hope to be
  effective with it; waiting to try it out ...). 

I could only add that, because I prefer a text login, I capture my X and
desktop apps workings with ~/.startx.log file:
$ alias startx='/usr/bin/startx -- -nolisten tcp >& .startx.log'
This may give some clue about the nature of any problems.

I find F13 quite stable (despite its dev nature); I prefer Gnome as well over
KDE, by any means. So I do not think you should drop either of them.
JB







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