Re: aptitude crashing x?

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 04:12:49AM -0800, joseph lockhart <jwl_andlovesaidno@yahoo.com> was heard to say:
> strange, every morning i run two aptitude commands
> from the command line
> 
> aptitude update and aptitude full-upgrade

  Does this happen every time you run an upgrade?
  Does "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" do the same thing?

  Does it get through the whole upgrade process and then reboot, or is
it rebooting while downloading packages?  Are the packages that you were
trying to upgrade upgraded afterwards?

  Does it go through the usual reboot procedure (so you see "stopping
down ___ ... done") or does it just abruptly reset?

> this occurs on both my etch and kubuntu 7.10 installs
> so i am fairly sure it is not a distro problem

  What sort of hardware is this running on?  If you run some other
process that exercises the network / CPU / disk a lot, does that have a
similar effect?  e.g., download and unpack a very large .tar.gz file.

> thanks in advance for any thoughts

  It sounds like a hardware problem to me.  It could be some rogue
package rebooting your system, but that's a very fringe possibility
(doubly so if this happens on every upgrade, when presumably you
aren't upgrading the same packages every time).  Certainly aptitude
itself doesn't shut the system down.

  Off the top of my head, the most likely hardware diagnosis is a power
problem -- maybe a loose cable or a flaky supply.

  Daniel