Nothing in any of the Xorg logs, or any of the other logs in /var/log in
general...
I will check on Numlock next time it happens. Luckily, I haven't had a
crash in a day *fingers crossed*. I ran fdisk and badblocks on it, and
it didn't seem to find any errors. I don't know if this has had an
affect on it... hopefully.
After it crashes, I have confirmed that ssh does not work. When I get
back to the computer, physically, it is on but the monitor has
disconnected. So it's in a weird state where the power is on but the
system is not.
Martin
Neil Parker wrote:
Martin Kelly wrote,
Nothing in /var/log/messages or dmesg... I don't think it's the kernel,
thankfully.
It might also be worthwhile to look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and possibly
/var/log/syslog.
Yeah, I wasn't able to do Ctrl+Alt+F6 to get to a virtual tty. Is X able
to free that up?
I just switched to amarok and I'm not getting crashes anymore. I'm
thinking it might've been XMMS's fault. I'd heard it was buggy, but
crashing a whole system? Also, I've been using XMMS for almost a year
and never had the problem... weird.
Just because you can't switch virtual TTYs doesn't mean the whole system
is locked up...it might be just your X server that's locked up. X
disables normal keystroke processing and does all the raw scancode
processing (including handling the VT-switching keys) itself, so if X
locks up, you're stuck with no way to switch to another virtual terminal.
I've had X lock up on me a few times. In my case it was usually due to
video hardware flakiness (helpful hint: never put an NVidia card into
a motherboard with an ALi 1541 chipset), but sometimes applications can
trigger bugs that cause X to freeze or crash.
When this happens, it may be possible to recover if you've left yourself
some other way to log in. If your computer is on a network, you can run
sshd or telnetd, and then when trouble strikes you can ssh or telnet in
from some other computer on the network. On my system I have a cable
running from my serial port to another computer, where I can use kermit to
log in.
Once you're in, the easiest way to clear up the problem may be to do a
clean reboot ("sudo shutdown -r now"). If you're feeling cleverer, a
frozen X server might be fixable by "kill -9"ing it.
- Neil Parker
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