[Dorset] Odd KDE almost-random lock-up issue

2011-04-29 Thread StarLion 
Hallo all. Got a bit of a puzzler for you to... well, puzzle over.
Finally gave in and put Arch on me new(er) laptop, set myself up a KDE
desktop, personalise, etc... the usual post-install kind of things.
Now, I've often got downloads I leave going overnight while I sleep,
which wouldn't be a problem... except at some point in the night the
entire system just locks up. By the time I open the lid in the
morning, the laptop presents me with a black screen and is totally
unresponsive.
Yet if I leave it on a console without X running, it doesn't happen.
Of course, this doesn't really help much, since the download app I use
is a graphic app without a CLI backend, inconveniently.
I've thought to check the logfiles, except even the 'everything.log'
just shows a line with '--MARK--' on it, and then nothing else until
syslog-ng starts up on the next boot up.
Without anything logged to trace it from, I'm at a complete loss here.
I've tried disabling pretty much all of KDE's power management in case
it happened to be that, but no luck.

Searching about the internet suggested two problem possibilities,
namely VLC (which apparently somehow causes KDE to experience issues
just by having it installed...) and cron, though there's nothing cron
is running except three daily jobs - logrotate, man-db and shadow
respectively, none of which would seem to me to be the cause.

Anyone got any ideas to lend a hand here?

--
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Re: [Dorset] Odd KDE almost-random lock-up issue

2011-04-29 Thread John Carlyle-Clarke 

On 29/04/11 23:20, StarLion wrote:



 On 29/04/11, Sean wrote:

How painful would it be for you to install say XFCE or Gnome and run the
same tasks overnight? While not a conclusive test it might help you to
eliminate certain factors.



Not exactly painful as such, but I don't exactly get along too well
with either, not to mention they often seem terribly over-full of not
so useful parts that other parts insist are vital to function.
I'll give an LXDE session a try tonight, unless your thinking is that
using one of the alternative DE's power managers might solve the
issues.


Alternatively, if you have another machine, leave the suspect laptop in 
console mode, connect to it from the other machine with ssh -Y and run 
the application using the display on the spare machine.  Make sure you 
enable X11Forwarding in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.


That will surely test if the problem is caused by X or not?

Also, if you want minimal testing environment, why not twm?  Trouble is, 
if you start a KDE app under twm or lxde, it could fire up a lot KDE 
service and processes anyway, so it may not be much different.



--
Next meeting:  Blandford Forum, Wednesday 2011-05-04 20:00
Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ...  http://dorset.lug.org.uk/
How to Report Bugs Effectively:  http://goo.gl/4Xue