RH7.2 gets hung

[eric_2k]

i've been trying out RH7.2 for about a week. haven't upgraded much of anything yet.

while in GNOME, it has 'frozen' about 10 times. keyboard, mouse, nothing works. usually nothing much is going on.. just froze this last time while i was playing mahjong. before while just moving the mouse across a mozilla screen or a nautilus screen.

had to hit the big red switch.

i didn't think Linux was supposed to 'freeze' like this without some way out?

any ideas on how to track this down?

does it sound keyboard or mouse related? like maybe i picked the wrong selection when i installed it? RH6.2 never froze like this.

i'm using an old microsoft 2-button ps/2 mouse and a keytronic keyboard of unknown model number (has the small enter key and separate arrow buttons in an inverted T pattern).

tia...

[doublec16]

I have been having this problem as well. I thought it was a hardware problem. It never hangs when I am not moving the mouse or typing. Perhaps it is a window manager problem. It's really annoying, to say the least.

[eric_2k]

i agree.. it seems to happen only when i'm moving the mouse somewhere.. then mouse stops and nothing works... not even ctrl-alt-del.

so i was thinking it was a mouse driver problem maybe... but i'm using the generic 2 button driver, which i would think should be pretty bullet proof.

[mdwatts]

Have a look through messages and gui or xfree86 in /var/log to see if you can find anything to indicate what the problem could be.

Check your bios settings including power management.

[mychl]

Another way out might be if you are networked, you can login to your machine and kill the X process.

Unfortunately when X freezes or locks up, the keyboard, mouse, etc.. are being used by it, so they get locked aswell.

When this happens though, you can still log in remotely, so you know your whole system hasn't locked.

Another possibility is to see if you are using an Athlon processor. If so I recommend you use your up2date client to upgrade your kernel to 2.4.19-3, the boxed kernel has a problem with fast athlons.

Good Luck

[doublec16]

For me it is impossible to login remotely because the machine totally locks up. I can't even ping it from outside.

[doublec16]

Well I can't say for sure that it's fixed, but since I upgraded the kernel to 2.4.18 (couldn't find 2.4.19 at kernel.org) it has not crashed for 2 days where it would crash at least twice a day before. I have a Athlon XP 1700+ in this machine so that might have been causing the crashing. Thanks for suggesting a kernel upgrade mychl. What is weird though is that for a month after I installed initially, it ran fine without crashing at all, and then suddenly started crashing frequently. I'm just glad I used ext3 partitions with the journalling so I haven't lost any data.

[mychl]

See if you can use your up2date agent to upgrade via RedHats network. It's a really cool utility, I would say almost like Debian's apt-get. Just log in, it'll tell you waht packages are available and you can pick which ones you want...

[doublec16]

My up2date won't connect at all. I like upgrading my kernel manually anyway just to be safe.