ubuntu jaunty seized up

[Karl F. Larsen]

prad wrote:
> i've recently installed jaunty on a compaq presario sr1920nx. i only
> have 512M of ram, but it is still running quite acceptably - faster
> than it did with debian 5.0 which surprised me.
>
> last night the entire system froze - can't move mouse, no response from
> keyboard ... nothing. so i had to off-on the machine. it froze during
> an install of gnome-office and i had claws-mail, firefox and emacs
> running at the time.
>
> is there anyway to find out what went wrong?
> are there log error files that can tell me what happened?
>
> i am assuming the problem has to do with not having more memory, but i
> don't know if that is correct.
>
>   
    It sounds like you don't have a swap partition. You should have a 
large one like 2 GB and make sure it is working. With a good swap your 
computer will never freeze but it will get slow when swapping is working.

    In a terminal type top and get used to reading it. Look at the top 
several lines.


Karl