freezing and problems booting

[willnapier]

Hi. I am enjoying Dapper Drake very much. I am not sure whether this is a Dapper issue, but I have recently started to have two issues:

1) Freezing/crashing.. Sometimes my whole system freezes up so that the mouse cursor won't move, nothing responds to the keyboard, and sometimes even turning off the pc at the front hasn't worked - This is true also of pressing the force-reboot small button on the front - it sometimes doesn't even respond, in which cases I have to turn the pc off at the back and reboot.

2) Recently booting up has not been reliable. Sometimes I have reached a terminal style cursor and nothing has proceeded. This has sometimes allowed me to browse my folders in terminal mode but when trying to start kde a message came up mentioning problems with the display. On other occasions I have not even got that far and have found that I have had to make multiple attempts to force reboots, turn off and on, etc.

I would be very grateful if someone has some pointers to what the problem may be, or how to find out what it may be. I am wondering whether it might be a sign of the age of the hardware. The motherboard is a 1.4 GHz AMD that I purchased a good 4/5 years ago, and the 20Gb Hard Disk is six years old. I have 512 Mb of RAM. I use the system for office functions and playing music and video. If someone can save me from having to buy a new system I would be very pleased!

With thanks

Will

[Rog131]

Re: freezing and problems booting

Linux keeps its log-files in the /var/log.

Check Xorg.0.log and dmesg. Maybe you can find errors after freezing.

Upon boot, the dmesg output is from the kernel booting, showing the devices it has found and if it has been able to configure them at all (aside from userland configuration). This log is also available in the file /var/log/dmesg.

More:

dmesg explained
http://linuxgazette.net/issue59/nazario.html

[willnapier]

Re: freezing and problems booting

Hi and thanks for the advice. Someone else suggested typing last | head in a terminal to get the time at which I last crashed. Then I looked up that time in the /var/log. My techy friend reckoned that the entries there suggested I have a hardware problem. That is what I wanted to know. I guess it's a new pc.