Rob Gillen wrote: > I've tried to query all of you gurus before regarding various hangs on > my system, but as far as I can tell, nobody has replied to my > question. So, I'll give it a go again. I've read everything on the > mailing list that was written in the last three months about system > hangs and freezes with both 8.1 and 8.2, but none have addressed the > problem that I have been seeing. Most have described complete system > freezes where nothing could be done besides a reboot, but what I am > seeing is a bit different. > > I have installed 8.2 on a Dell Precision 410 (Pentium III - 500). > Everything works fine for a while, and then within a period of 24 to > 72 hours, the system develops a strange disregard for any terminal / > shell sessions. Interestingly, I had a similar problem with 7.2 on > the same model machine, and it went away, but I have no idea what > cured it. The strange thing about this is that any current terminal > sessions that are in progress have no problems, and I can do any > normal command-line work without problems. If I am logged into a > window manager such as KDE, I also have no problem starting > applications from icons as long as they do not require a shell to > begin or to work properly. If I am using a shell when this anomaly > occurs, and I try to su to another user, it will try to start another > shell, but will hang. At first I thought that the problem might be > related to something with the network. But when I am waiting for the > hanging shell, I can browse the web, etc. Another interesting bit is > that I can ssh into the machine, and will be given a login prompt, but > as soon as ssh tries to invoke a shell, the login hangs. > > I am really at a loss as to what the problem might be. It seems to be > related to shells acquiring a tty, but I'm not sure about that. Now > that I think of it, next time this happens, if I have a terminal open, > I'll try to do a strace on a new shell session to see where the hangup > occurs. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated. One other > thing that might be related is the fact that I've had problems > shutting the system down cleanly. The entire shutdown process gets > hung up when it tries to umount the /net subdirectory. I turned off > amd, and so far that seems to have helped, but I only made that change > yesterday, so I cannot be completely sure. > > I'm not sure how experienced some people on this list are with deep > problems like this. The silence from the last one leaves me to > believe that either nobody has a clue or that nobody is interested > (because nobody else has experienced the same problem -- at least > nobody has described the same problem). Either way, if I figure it > out, I'll try to detail what the problem was and how to resolve it. > > Rob > > >
Well, look at power management. Dell isn't very configurable on that score but try to turn off ACPI entirely. On the linux side, edit your XFree config file and (it will be XF86Config or XF86Config-4 in the directory /etc/X11/) so that Option "DPMS" "on" is Option "DPMS" "off" There is alpha quality ACPI support in the most recent kernels but no one is compiling it in to distros yet because it is such poor support at this time. This is what happens when a company (Intel in this case) makes its own standard and imposes it on the industry. The lag is much much longer than if the standard is developed openly. And a few probably did not want to answer because they care not to tell you that at least part of your problem is that it is a Dell. Dell uses its tremendous buying power to make its own tweaks on its systems, and I think you know with its very strong support of Microsoft that linux compatibility is pretty far from its primary objective, which, from my observation, seems to be cost savings in an extremely competitive and cost-sensitive market. And if, as it seems, you are using autofs, it might be wise to do a little search on www.mandrakeuser.org for why not to use it. Supermount works acceptably in 8.2. Civileme > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? >Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com >
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
