Crashing with Dell

Michael J. Lynch mlynch at gcom.com
Mon Aug 22 15:28:16 UTC 2005


Dennis_Drescher at sil.org wrote:
> I've been using Ubuntu for a couple months now on both a Dell Precision 
> 330 and a Latitude D610. Off and on I've had problems with what I'll call 
> hard crashes. What I mean is that the machine completely locks up and will 
> not allow me to take it down by going into a shell. The only way to 
> recover is to power down. This obviously wreaks havoc on my file structure 
> and I have to run fsck often to fix the partitions. The Latitude, which is 
> running Ubuntu 5.0.4 (with the KDE desktop installed) locks up 
> infrequently and it is hard to predict. The Precision 330 locks up several 
> times a day. Sometimes while I'm typing or using the mouse, many times 
> just while it is sits idle.
> 
> I've used Linux for several years now and have never had such an unstable 
> system. I also run Kanotix on both machines in another partition and it 
> can run all day long with no problems. I've also run checks on my hardware 
> and I'm confident it is functioning okay. I'm thinking it might be a 
> problem with X but I'm not sure what to do at this point. Can anyone give 
> me some clues as to how to diagnose this? Thanks.
> 

Can you SSH or telnet into the machine?  If so, run top and see if X is
taking up pretty much all of your processor.  If so, I've heard of this
occurring and experienced it myself.  I don't know how to fix it, but
I've heard that it *may* be a problem with the Xorg distribution of X
and/or DRI.


-- 
Michael J. Lynch

What if the hokey pokey IS what it's all about -- author unknown





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