Ubuntu getting locked up

[Chuck Kuecker]

Hi, Markus,

Well, I am back up. Thanks for the pointer on rebooting from a locked-up 
display. I will keep it posted next to the monitor. It took me two days 
to recover, but Google is your friend here.

I know a whole lot more about fsck, gpart, and testdisk now, anyway :)

I will dig into the log files and do some investigating.

Thanks again.

Chuck Kuecker

Markus Schönhaber wrote:
> 20.03.2010 12:28, Chuck Kuecker:
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Don't do that - unless nothing else helps. Among the things you could
> try are:
> - Provided you have sshd running on the machine and another computer in
> your network, try to log in via ssh and reboot,
> - Try rebooting via SysRq. Generally pressing and holding Ctrl+Alt and
> then PrintScr, R, E, I, S, U, B (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring)
> should do a clean reboot.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> I have rarely had lock-ups of Linux machines. But when one occurred,
> almost always the (proprietary) graphics driver was to blame. Might be
> the source of your problem, too.
> You should check the Xorg logs, syslog etc. Maybe you'll find additional
> information about the root cause of the problem.
>
>