[ubuntu-uk] crashes

[Neil Greenwood]

2008/8/4 Steve Flynn <anothermindbomb at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:26 AM, London School of Puppetry
> <lspinfo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have just asked for help re the computer crashes- it seems that everything
>> in the top tool bar freezes- applications, places, system , updates and shut
>> down button, and the bottom of the page any open documents won't close- they
>> don't respond to the mousepad.
>
> Have you read the syslog to see if there is anything obvious in there?
> Have you installed any new software in the machine immediately before
> it began exhibiting this behaviour?
> Can you switch to another console? If so, what does 'top' tell you?

Just to clarify, since I seem to remember that Caroline (the original
poster) has not been using Linux for that long:

To switch to another console, hold down the Alt and Ctrl keys and,
while still pressing them, press the F1 key, then release all the keys
(the short name for this is Alt+Ctrl+F1). If it works, the Gnome
(normal Ubuntu) desktop will be replaced with a black screen with some
white text, the last line of which will be prompting for a login.
Enter your username, press Enter, and enter your password when
prompted. The type the 'top' command and press Enter. A full
explanation of the output of this command would take quite a while,
but basically you want to look at the couple of lines just below the
heading about a third of the way down the screen - mine is currently
listing 'firefox-bin' using 5% of the CPU. although it's fluctuating
up to about 20% for short periods.

If there's a rogue process that is causing your crash, it will
probably be using 90+% of the CPU, and its the name of this process
that would help.

In order to switch back from the console that you've just swapped to,
use the Alt+Ctrl+F7 key combination to change back to the normal
Ubuntu desktop.


The syslog can be read using a menu option: choose System >
Administration > System Log
Of course, this will only work if the top panel is responding to the
mouse. After rebooting, the messages should still be there. There are
ways to read the system log from the text console, but this post is
quite long enough already!


One last point: where I've mentioned the Ubuntu/Gnome desktop, it will
also apply to Kubuntu/KDE and (maybe, although I've not tried it)
Xubuntu/XFCE.

Hwyl,
Neil.