Re: Frequent freezing around login screens
W. Pepperdine,
Apologies, but I am mostly out of ideas. Hopefully people with more knowledge than myself will assist.
I could not see any issues in the logs that you provided.
I do not think your issue is with LightDM. I still think it might be with hardware.
Max suggested checking with journalctl which may
help, but I am thinking that if the computer is freezing, then nothing
can get written to the logs anyway, so searching logs may not help.
For example:
# journalctl --priority=err --no-pager
If you can, I suggest installing Debian 12 KDE and see if all works or not. KDE does not use LightDM and instead uses SDDM so if your ThinkCentre M920q then locks up, the issue is not LightDM. If you can easily replace the disk drive in the ThinkCentre M920q with another disk drive, then you could put aside your existing drive so you do not destroy the data on it while doing this test. However if you have already reinstalled several times, you may not have any data you need to keep on your current disk drive?
When checking my logs, I found that one of my UDEV rules was still using SYSFS instead of ATTRS. For me, correcting this was easy as changing SYSFS to ATTRS.
# grep -i "SYSFS" /etc/udev/rules.d/*.rules
George.
On Thursday, 27-03-2025 at 18:34 W. Pepperdine wrote:
> > Here are outputs of a few queries on log entries
> > from one of my XFCE installations. How do they compare
> > with your logs? Can you see any reports on your
> > computer that could point to what is causing your issue?
> After a system freeze, I rebooted to the desktop as root and collected these reports. Others looked at them but didn't see a cause for the freeze.
>
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log (http://paste.debian.net/1365570/)
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old (http://paste.debian.net/1365571/)
> /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log (http://paste.debian.net/1365572/)
> /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log.old (http://paste.debian.net/1365573/)
> dmesg (http://paste.debian.net/1365575/)
> journalctl -b -p3 (http://paste.debian.net/1365578/)
>
> Any suggestion for what else to check?
>
> I have three theories for the problem.
>
> 1. It's hardware. The problem is that it's a new machine, checks with other software seem OK, and the freezing occurs only during login/out.
>
> 2. It's LightDM. Since the freezing only happens around login/out, that seems to point to the display manager, but would a frozen DM take out the USB ports?
> 3. It's the kernel configuration. At the moment, that seems most likely to me. I've been reading that the Lenovo machines can have some peculiar interactions with kernel modules, so I'm now checking into that.
>
> On Tuesday, March 25th, 2025 at 6:51 PM, W. Pepperdine <wenpep@protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Debian+XFCE freezes randomly either just before, during, or a couple seconds after the login screen. It happens about a third the time, both on booting and on changing users. During a freeze, the screen displays but is not updated and the USB ports appear inactive. There is no mouse or keyboard input, not even from SysRq. The only thing to do is a hard shutdown with the power button.
> >
> > I first installed Trixie and had this problem and others. Downgraded to Bookworm and have just this problem left. The machine is a ThinkCentre M920q with i5-9600T, 8GB RAM, and UHD Graphics 630.
> >
> > Have already had some discussion of log output on Debian User Forums.
> >
> > Computer freezing because of LightDM?https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=162147
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