Ubuntu getting locked up

[Chuck Kuecker]

Hello,

I have a strange thing going on with my system. Three times now, Ubuntu
has gotten locked up somehow such that I cannot open a terminal window
or restart or reboot the system. I cannot stop the X-windows either. I
am running Ubuntu 9.10 with all the latest updates.

So, I kill power and restart. Each time, the system comes up with a
damaged filesystem and goes into recovery mode. I run fsck, fix all the
errors, and reboot. The system is fine when it restarts.

OK. So I go on with the development code I am working with. I had to
interrupt the build script with control-C. Now the weirdness starts.

First symptom is that the terminal window now does not do line feeds.
The prompt just wraps around. Up and down arrows do not access previous
commands.
I kill the terminal window and attempt to open another, It opens, but is
blank white, with no cursor.

I try to restart - the pulldown menu works, but the restart and reboot
buttons do nothing. So, I kill power and start over.

When I run fsck, it seems like the corrupted orphan linked list inodes
and other errors such as counts are always the same. Suspicious.

The hard disk with the filesystem is a new disk, less than two months usage.

When the system restarts, my email server and Apache are working normally.

One other thing I noticed - whether it makes any difference, I am
running the 'engine' screen saver that shows animated IC engines. Lately
it has been very slow, although there is not much going on when I look
at CPU usage on the system monitor. The last time after I ran fsck and
rebooted, the screen saver ran at normal speed. Perhaps a clue.

Has anyone seen this kind of scenario? I am wondering if the build
script is somehow breaking something. It's a version of ltib provided by
Freescale for their embedded processor running Linux.

Chuck Kuecker