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From: NoStop 
Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.ubuntu
Subject: Re: Computer Freezing Up
Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 08:46:08 -0800
Organization: Uniserve Communications Corporation
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Alias wrote:

> SINNER wrote:
>> * Alias wrote in alt.os.linux.ubuntu:
>>> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:51:42 +0100, Alias wrote:
>> 
>>>>> Sometimes, but not all the time, when I go to shutdown or reboot and
>>>>> click on one of those options, the window disappears and the computer
>>>>> freezes up. The mouse will move but can't do anything. Same for the
>>>>> keyboard. If I force it to shut down and then reboot, all is well
>>>>> again.
>> 
>>>>> Any suggestions?
>> 
>>>>> Thanks,
>> 
>>>>> Alias
>> 
>>>> Sounds like a problem with X. What kind of graphics card do you have?
>>>> Which driver are you using?
>> 
>>> What is X?
>> 
>> X is short for Xserver, the graphical display server in *nix
>> distributions. If it is not working or installed you can wind up at a
>> console type login: prompt or see nothing at all.
>> 
>>> I am using an ATI Radeon 9200 PRO 128MB card and using
>>> whatever drivers Ubuntu 6.06 has. I did not install any myself.
>> 
Check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and more than likely it's installed
the "ati" driver. This is an oss driver. You might consider changing this
to "radeon", which I found was a little more stabler. If indeed the
problems are related to your drivers with that card, you might check to see
if there are proprietary drivers for that card from ATI that will work
better for you.

>> I undesratand that ATI drivers can be problematic but I dont use ATI so
>> I cant speak from experience, only from what I see posted.
>> 
>> If you hit CTL + ALT + Backspace at the blank screen so you see a
>> change?
> 
> I like that.
> 
That keyboard combination simply restarts your GDM. The same could be
accomplished from a terminal using:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

>> How about CTL+ALT+F2?
> 
> I didn't like that because I have no idea what to do with it.
> 
Alias, it's just another fullscreen terminal. There are a number of them (6
in fact) accessible by CTL+ALT+Fn (from F1 to F6). F7 is the terminal in
which GDM runs and further GUI desktops can be run in terminals above F7.
While in one of those fullscreen terminals ALT+Fn will toggle between them.
Once in a fullscreen terminal you can run any commandline commands or
programs, just as you would in a terminal on your GUI desktop. If you are
having shutdown problems, looking at your logs from one of these terminals
is the best way to determine what is hanging the shutdown. It could be that
init is having a hard time closing some app. You could force a shutdown
from one of these terminals by doing:

sudo shutdown

Another thing to try from a fullscreen terminal is to determine what might
be using up CPU timeslices. You could run "top" to see this, although an
easier version of top to use that will allow you to highlight an offending
process and kill it is a program called "htop". Install it doing...

sudo apt-get install htop

After installation simply run: htop  at a command prompt.


> I will try the first option the next time it freezes but it would be
> nice to know how to stop it from freezing in the first place.
> 
From a fullscreen terminal, checkout some of the logfiles for possible
problems:

less /var/log/syslog
less /var/log/messages
dmesg
less /var/Xorg.0.log

less is like cat except it allows you to scroll through the file you're
looking at, up and down the file. Q is used to quit out of less.

Another possible handy command to use is tail. This will just display the
last few lines of a file, which could be the place problems are being
reported if they are the latest problems ...

tail /var/log/messages   for example

> Alias

Cheers.

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