Re: Gnome Freeze

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 04:19:08PM +0100, Keith O'Connell wrote:
| This is something I have not seen mentioned before, and fro which I have
| run out of (limited) ideas.
| 
| I have four machines of varying ages and specs (all intel/amd) and I am
| moving them all away from windows on on to Debian. They are getting
| there and the problems that do exist are ones that I will solve as I
| move further along the learning curve. There is one I have just hit that
| I cannot think how to approach.
| 
| I built a PC around an AMD 1.2G on a Gigabyte board. There are no exotic
| components but it is the fastest of the processors I have available to
| me. I have loaded stable on to it and it works just fine. I have
| configured X and it works just fine. I can run at a zippity-whizz pace
| ice, wmaker and all the other regular window managers, However...
| 
| 	...when I load the Gnome desktop into play the machine will freeze at
| the first gnome action I try (selecting an icon of the desktop or
| similar). Locks up tight. I have to Ctrl-Alt-Bkspace to get out. If I
| try to log back in a xdm it won't progress beyond accepting the
| password. To get into X again once Gnome has aborted I have to reboot!

When GNOME locks up, can you press Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] to get to a virtual
console?  If so, what does 'top' say about the CPU usage of various
processes?  Since you are new you probably aren't familiar with top.
When you run it, press "P" (case matters) to sort by CPU usage.  The
screen will look something like

 11:36:12 up  2:43,  3 users,  load average: 0.07, 0.10, 0.06
66 processes: 63 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:   4.3% user,   1.0% system,   0.0% nice,  94.7% idle
Mem:    255820K total,   233548K used,    22272K free,    17860K buffers
Swap:   249472K total,     7620K used,   241852K free,   101660K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 2492 root      11 -10 15504  11M  3300 S <   1.9  4.4   0:06 XFree86
 2636 dman      14   0  4280 4280  3492 S     1.5  1.6   0:06 deskguide_apple
 2601 dman      11   0  4352 4352  3404 R     0.7  1.7   0:00 gnome-terminal
 2658 dman      12   0  1000 1000   776 R     0.3  0.3   0:00 top
  303 root      11   0   100   56    56 S     0.1  0.0   0:03 gpm


The first line tells you what time it is, how long the system has been
running and what the load is for the last 5 , 10 , and 15 minutes.
Then it gives some CPU and memory usage info, then lists all the
running processes (that fit on the screen).

See if the %CPU column has a really high number for some process.  The
process name will be in the right column.

What happens if you kill that process?  (login to a different vc and
run 'kill -KILL <pid>' where <pid> is the number in the left hand
column.  I suspect that even after you have killed the X server that
there is some GNOME process (or lock) remaining such that you can't
login via xdm.

Do you have sshd (or telnetd) running?  (Did you install ssh?)
Sometimes an X app locks up and you can't really do anything with the
keyboard/mouse that is plugged into the machine.  The system isn't
really dead because you can login via ssh (or telnet) from another
machine on the network and then kill the offending process without
restarting or killing other unrelated apps.

HTH,
-D