System freezes...why oh why?

[heinkel_111]

Yesterday I experienced 3 system freezes that made it impossible to do anything. This means I could not communicate with my system in any way and I had to do the powerbutton off thing in order to continue. I am a litlle bit disappointed, as this reminds me of the Macintosh I had whne I was a student (and to to add insult to injury, a recent OS that my PC came packed with :P) I guess something I am doing is wrong, something I have done is wrong or I am just not right....right?

My kubuntu installation was supposed to be more stable than this!

I don't have many applications on my system except for the base kubuntu install (Mozilla thunderbird, Inkscape and GIMP - that's it. There are also some libraries that allow my AmaroK to play MP3s). I am running kubuntu 5.10 on a P4 2.8 Ghz intel pentium 4, memory 2.5 Gb Ram, Point of View 6800 GT graphics card (nvidia chips), and soundcard is Creative Audigy 2 SZ or ZS or something like that.

The system freezes first happened when I had a lot of applications up. (Konqueror, Konversation, AMaroK, GIMP, INkscape). Then I rebooted and I think I got AmaroK, Konqueror and maybe Konversation up - and it happened again. Rebooted again, and this time I am only running Konqueror and (curses) system freezes for the third time.

I get the impression that what causes the system freezes is either Konqueror - related or something related with the desktop environment (ie. KDE "crashes"). I could maybe work around it by allowing ssh login (disabled atm) and learning how to kill and restart KDE from the command line? I sometimes bring a laptop home and I guess I could configure that to run some kind of ssh client which I could use to kill and restart. This would only be a time consuming work around, though..

The better thing would be to learn what really happens when the system freezes, how that can be avoided and maybe some thing I can do from my usual input devices (keyboard, mouse) to stop and restart KDE desktop when the system freezes?

Any advice on how to solve this frequently occuring problem is appreciated.

[aysiu]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

You may want to try a few experiments to see what's wrong exactly.

I know a couple of things, though--only the Linux kernel is extremely stable, not necessarily the desktop environment that's running on top of it. KDE applications have frequent crashes.

That does not mean, however, that the entire screen freezes up. That's not normal.

So, some experiments:

1. Create a new user. See if that user has the same problems. If not, then maybe your user profile got screwed up somehow.

2. I hesitate to ask you to do something so extreme, but you may want to try installing Gnome temporarily. If you want to get rid of it later, you can do this. However, it may be worth trying out to see if those same applications open freeze up your computer even in Gnome. If they don't, something may be wrong with KDE.

Unfortunately, if something's wrong with your user profile, it's not an easy fix, but it can be fixed. And if something's wrong with KDE, the only thing I can think of is... not using it (using Gnome or XFCE instead).

This isn't normal behavior, though.

[Guest]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

KDE freezes for me too. Maybe related to screensaver as it only happens when I'm not using it. Mouse moves but KDE doesn't respond to keyboard or clicks. Ctrl Alt Bkspc and I login and all's OK till next time.

[integr8e]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

Same here, my computer runs well until I leave it alone for a while. Whenever I get back on it, it rejuvenates from Standby, but refuses to respond to anything other than mouse movement; I have to reboot whenever this happens because my system doesn't even respond to keyboard commands. What's up with this?

[dibl]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

Open your console and run

top

Just minimize the console window, or put it down in the corner somewhere where you can see the top line or two. Then do what you always do. When your system is "frozen" (which it probably is not), take a look at top and see what process is consuming 100% of the CPU resource. I'm running Gutsy beta and recently caught a semi-useless indexer named "strigi" doing the same thing to me (it had been auto-installed by Gutsy Tribe 5, I guess). So I removed the "strigi" package, and life goes on more or less normally again.

[integr8e]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

Nice tip, thanks . . .

[mivo]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

You can also try the Runaway Process Catcher. Just click on the panel, select "Add Applet to Panel ...", and select it from the list. Setting it to 120-200 seems a good value for me (the default of 20 is way too low). It will at least allow you to terminate amok-running processes before they cause the system to become unresponsive.

[integr8e]

Re: System freezes...why oh why?

Thank you . . . I had looked at the applet before, but didn't really know what it was for. I'll give both methods a try