[ale] Strange hangs with Mandrake 9.2 & GNOME

[Stephen Leonard]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 10:09:16AM -0400, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> You may have heard me mention that I have my wife using Linux, now.  She has a 
> nice fast hyperthreading CPU, plenty of RAM, CDRW, DVD reader--in short, she 
> should be a happy camper.
> 
> I recently upgraded her to Mandrake 9.2 with the latest OpenOffice, GNOME, and 
> Evolution and suddenly weird stuff is happening.  Her system will suddenly 
> hang for a few seconds, then restart.  Internet activities (http and POP 
> mail, for example) seem very slow.
> 
> As she was complaining I started watching her machine from my laptop.  It was 
> not returning pings very well--sometime not at all, and sometimes with 5 
> second delays.  I logged on to her machine and pinged the mail server--it was 
> showing the same problems.  I could ping it fine from my laptop.
> 
> Later I logged on to her system.  I was running top, then I started xosview 
> which is a graphical system monitor.  xosview show 100% CPU usage, but top 
> didn't show any process using much CPU.  This lasted about 5 seconds, then 
> stopped and I couldn't get it to recur over the next hour.
> 
> Any clues or suggestions?  I'm running two other Mandrake installations 
> without trouble, though they tend to be in KDE, not GNOME.

Are there any kernel messages from syslog other than boot messages
that may indicate an error?  My system logs kernel messages to
/var/log/kern.log.  Yours may be different, but /etc/syslog.conf
will tell.  The file should be listed near the 'kern' facility.

Also, are you using any binary-only modules (e.g. nvidia drivers)?
If so, you may want to try reproducing the system hang without these
modules loaded.

hth
stephen