It's been a while now, about five months and I still haven't gor my AMD64 working properly. Granted, I haven't been working at it *all* the time, have taken time off to bury my father and deal with an estate and taxes. There are always death and taxes, aren't there? It's working better than it was originally, but it still crashes. At least, it gives the appearance of crashing. The mouse freeses, and nothing seems to work properly except for the reset button.
Close investigation indicates this is not quite completely dead. At least sometimes, the keyboard is still active for things like using tab to switch between fields in Firefox. But control-alt-F* doesn't let me switch virtual terminals any more. There's little I can do but press reset. Control-alt-backspace shuts my X session down, but doesn't get me to anyplace I can recover from. But another thing still works, too. This morning I discovered that if I already have an ssh connexion into the machine from elsewhere, I can continue using it. Except that response time has ballooned -- sometimes it responds in about ten or fifteen seconds, but usually it's minutes. Eventually, though, it does respond, so it's not dead. I'll call this behaviour a "crash" in the rest of this message, though, as the machine is pretty well useless until a reboot. Evidently, something is hogging some critical resource, possibly the CPU (the usual suspect) but it could also be a networking resource, since that's what the mouse and ssh seem to have in common. Any other candidates? --- But a lot of the system *does* run well. When used as a file server, it works flawlessly. When logged into remotely from another machine using XDMCP, it works flawlessly. When used locally in text mode, it workd flawlessly. When logged in locally using the X server it crashes. I suspect a measure of software involvement in the crashes, because when I upgraded the nvidia drivers from 1.0.8756-1 to 1.0.8762-2 and also upgraded the kernel from 2.6.12 to 2.6.15 the crashes became less frequent. Before, it seemed that it crashed when the mouse moved during screen updates. Not is seems (mostly) just to crash during menu operations. Once it even crashed in gdm when I was using the menu to select my session. It seems to crash less with fvwm than icewm. --- The motherboard is an Asus A8N-VM-UAYGZ described on the box as Aocket 939, nVidia GeForce6100+nForce410,2000MT/sDual- channel DDR,VGA integrated, PCI Express X16 6-channel HD audio, 10/100 LAN, ATA133*2+SATA II*28 USB 2.0, Q-Fan technology, CrashFree BIOS I have 2 G RAM, and 1G swap. It's normally boots a 2.6.15 stock Debian kernel, runs etch, has nvidia drivers I compiled from the Debian nvidia-kernel-source package. It can also boot a 2.6.12 kernel, which I keep around to have an alternative in case things go really wrong. For this reason udev is held at 0.091-2, since the latest etch udev, 0.093-1, rejects the 2.6.12 kernel. There is no Microsoft software on this machine. Not even close. Not even wine. --- What works: text consoles, xterms. I can compile, run, edit, use emacs, ssh to another machine to read my mail, edit quotas, run aptitude, etc. All with no trouble. What crashes: * menus, sometimes, but enough to make me leery of opening menus. * xjig, after a few puzzles, but rarely. ABout 5 to 10% chance of crashing per puzzle. It used to be about 20% with the old nvidia drivers and 2.6.12. What crashes fast: * Firefox, especially when scrolling on complex web pages. * Pan Other browsers, but I forget which ones. --- What should I do to try and diagnose the problem? * If I get into the system using a text login after a crash but before a reboot, what information should I collect? From where in the system? * What logs should I still bother collecting *after a reboot*, in case I can't do it before ther raboot? * What software is available to test this hardware? * Would it be diagnostic to do a fresh install of the 32-bit etch in new partition? If so, which installer is actually likely to work these days? (I've been seeing some worrisome reports on debian-user. The installer I use *has* to be able to handle software RAID and lvm, since /home is on a reiser LVM sotware-RAID partition. Is there any particular problem in kaving two boot partitions and having to keep LVM configuration files synchronised? -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]