Hi Ross, I have certainly experienced the beeping, but I don't recall ever having had my computer lock because of it. I'm pretty sure that it's because sawfish/sawmill doesn't like to be upgraded while it's running (at least, for the helix-gnome packages). Generally Bad Things happen, of which the beeping is just one of several. Maybe your crash happened because sawfish caused X to crash, taking the keyboard with it. At such times you can sometimes telnet in and shut it down gracefully (if you have a nothing computer), or else sometimes the magic sysreq key will work (ALT-SYSREQ-s ALT-SYSREQ-u), from which you can safely hit the reset switch. Whenever I do an apt-get upgrade of helix gnome, I always use the -u switch to see if it's going to upgrade sawfish. If it does I'll log off X first, update, then log back in, which seems to work, but is a pain. Of course, if you're not running sawfish, then I have no idea... HTH, damon Quoth Ross Boylan, > A little earlier this evening I did an apt-get upgrade, which picked > up about 6 packages. I am getting them from potato and helix-gnome, > so probably they came from the latter. > > I came back well after everything had finished; it all looked OK. I > dial up. But when I tried to switch windows, I couldn't and I got a > very rapid beeping noise. At first I thought it was my modem having > troubles, but I think it was the computer's beeper or even some other > hardware (crazy disk accessing?). > > The only thing I could do was click on the GNOME start menu and select > log off. I hit yes when asked to confirm. After that the system was > totally unresponsive (though still beeping). ctl-alt-del did nothing > (AMD K6-2 CPU and ASUS P5A motherboard). I had to hit the computer's > restart switch. Just like MS-Windows (ouch!) > > Unfortunately the script I recorded with the download vanished (fsck > had to fix up the disks), so I can't say exactly what got downloaded. > > So ... does anyone know what the beeping might indicate? Is this a > well-known mode the system gets into? > > And has anyone else had this problem, or have any ideas what might be > going on. > > The reboot seems to have cleared things up, so I'm not in any pain > from the problem--just curious. > > Thanks. > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null -- Damon Muller | Did a large procession wave their torches Criminologist/Linux Geek | As my head fell in the basket, http://killfilter.com | And was everybody dancing on the casket... PGP (GnuPG): A136E829 | - TBMG, "Dead"
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