Re: Tired of freezing laptop


Bart Silverstrim wrote:
Pat Brown wrote:

I'm getting very tired of having my PC freeze up almost every time I go
online. I'm using Hardy on a Compaq Presario C700, with a Broadcom B43
wireless card. I apply every update the update manager detects. I've
been running Hardy since it was released and this problem is ongoing. It
doesn't seem to matter what I am doing online, eventually it will freeze
and require a soft boot using CTRL+ALT+Backspace. I've run some of the
tests people have suggested but the results mean nothing to me - I
posted them once and never heard any comments on whether it showed anything.

I also can't watch YouTube videos at all on Konquerer. Sometimes I can
watch them on Firefox 3.0.1 but it too will shut down without warning.

I recently picked up an almost new PC which I was originally going to
install Ubuntu on. Now I'm reconsidering and think I'm going to go back
to XP so I can watch videos and surf without this hassle all the time.
I'll keep Ubuntu on my laptop because I like it, but I don't like this
problem and until it's fixed I need an alternative that's more reliable.


I didn't see your original thread, but a couple things to start with...

The freezing. You said ctl-alt-backspace brings the system back...that
restarts X, not the system, so this would mean that it's actually the
GUI you're restarting and not the system, is this accurate?

What shows up under /var/log/system.log? And what is output from dmesg?

Does the entire interface freeze, or do you still have *some* control?
It would be handy if you could run something like the system monitor or
in a terminal run "top" to see if they freeze up as well, because if
not, it *might* show if a process is eating the CPU at %100 or if the
swap is suddenly growing. I don't know if you have this capability but I
diagnosed a problem like that before using a second computer that I
secure-shelled into (if your system is running sshd, the
opensshd-server) and ran top on from another system. The interface on
the workstation froze, but background processes were still running fine
so I could see the offending process (and kill it from the remote terminal).

The flash issue. I had this problem not long ago and as I recall my fix
was the flashplugin-nonfree package. Using synaptic, do you have the
package "flashplugin-nonfree" installed? I believe I could play on the
YouTubes once I had that package installed.

-Bart


Okay, I guess I'm restarting the X system. I have some keyboard ability,
but that's all. If I knew some commands to run a terminal that way since
I can't access it through the GUI, I could check processes and see if
something was hogging the system, but I don't know the commands. I have
the output from dmesg, but it's after restarting X. I would love to know
how to get to a place to kill a process - and know the name of the
process. I'm assuming it's Konquerer that's doing the CPU hogging since
it's always Konquerer that freezes X.

When I have full keyboard access I can see Konquerer in the system
monitor. It's called konquerer [kdeinit] --si which means nothing to me,
I'm afraid. I'm doing my best to learn Linux/Ubuntu but I'm still very
green.

The flashplugin-nonfree appears to be installed already.

How do I get to a terminal when my X is frozen? I'll try that next time
it freezes.

Pat Brown
pat.mysterywriter@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.pabrown.ca/

L.A. Heat, now hotter than ever!




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