[ale] Strange hangs with Mandrake 9.2 & GNOME

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 30 October 2003 09:44 am, Stephen Leonard wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 10:09:16AM -0400, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > You may have heard me mention that I have my wife using Linux, now.  She
> > has a nice fast hyperthreading CPU, plenty of RAM, CDRW, DVD reader--in
> > short, she should be a happy camper.
> >
> > I recently upgraded her to Mandrake 9.2 with the latest OpenOffice,
> > GNOME, and Evolution and suddenly weird stuff is happening.  Her system
> > will suddenly hang for a few seconds, then restart.  Internet activities
> > (http and POP mail, for example) seem very slow.
> >
> > As she was complaining I started watching her machine from my laptop.  It
> > was not returning pings very well--sometime not at all, and sometimes
> > with 5 second delays.  I logged on to her machine and pinged the mail
> > server--it was showing the same problems.  I could ping it fine from my
> > laptop.
> >
> > Later I logged on to her system.  I was running top, then I started
> > xosview which is a graphical system monitor.  xosview show 100% CPU
> > usage, but top didn't show any process using much CPU.  This lasted about
> > 5 seconds, then stopped and I couldn't get it to recur over the next
> > hour.
> >
> > Any clues or suggestions?  I'm running two other Mandrake installations
> > without trouble, though they tend to be in KDE, not GNOME.
>
> Are there any kernel messages from syslog other than boot messages
> that may indicate an error?  My system logs kernel messages to
> /var/log/kern.log.  Yours may be different, but /etc/syslog.conf
> will tell.  The file should be listed near the 'kern' facility.

I think mine are in /var/log/messages, and no, I didn't see anything there.  I 
did look.

> Also, are you using any binary-only modules (e.g. nvidia drivers)?
> If so, you may want to try reproducing the system hang without these
> modules loaded.

Non that I know of.  I can't recall the exact video card, but I'm pretty sure 
it is supported in the standard kernel/XFree.

Thanks,

Michael