Re: xwindows

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

raymond ferrari wrote:
> 
> I was in xwindows today reading the information under Debian online help
> and specifically the ethernet Howto, clicked on 3com to read
> documentation and that's when nothing happened. Everything froze, except
> my hard drive. The light kept going, blinking but I couldn't exit,
> shutdown, cntrl/alt/backspace, q, cntrl/alt/del, mouse wouldn't work,
> keyboard froze, nothing. I had to shut down the power after three hours
> of nothing happening. I was in root, and I don't know what I may have
> done to files etc. Can someone please tell me what to do next. I haven't
> gone back into Debian yet, however I was able to start win95 without a
> problem and I have cleaned the hard drive and I am going to completely
> scandisk the hard drive and fix auto. I'll come back to this list in a
> little while.TIA.Ray Ferrari
>
This sounds more like a hardware problem than software (of
course, that's just a "gut feeling" based on fairly limited
experience). My first suspicion would be an overheated CPU, with
my second suspicion being a bad RAM module. Of course, this isn't
to say that it's not a software problem, but the only time I've
seen X lock up that badly was related to Netscape and/or running
a Windows app via WINE. And even then I could telnet into the box
from a remote computer (of course you have to be on a
network/online in order to do that).

Nonetheless, it happened. Unless you're running an UMSDOS system
(Linux on a DOS partition - not likely) or accessing files on the
Win95 partition while in Linux, Win95 should not have been
affected, and running Scandisk won't fix any problems on the
Linux partition.

When you go back into Linux, it'll automatically see that it
wasn't shut down properly and will run it's version of Scandisk
(fsck - File System ChecK maybe?). Chances are real good that no
real damage was done.

If it happens again, you might want to compile a kernel (you'll
want to eventually anyway); I understand this is a good way to
stress-test the RAM in your box, and might give you a clue as to
whether you have a RAM problem. There are also software utilities
that will check your hardware over, but I've never used one that
I felt gave 100% reliable results (more like 70-80% has been my
experience). Your local hardware shop might have a RAM tester;
that's a little bit better of a test, but of course it only tests
the RAM, not the CPU, motherboard, etc.

On the other hand, you'd expect to see problems in Windows if it
was a hardware problem, unless you don't load down the system
fairly heavily.