[PLUG] So now the desktop computer is locking up

Dale Snell ddsnell at frontier.com
Sat Mar 23 16:42:35 UTC 2013


On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 07:27:17 -0700
"Richard C. Steffens" <rsteff at comcast.net> wrote:

> On 03/22/2013 09:51 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > Previously it was the Fedora 16 laptop, discussed here previously.
> > Probably a hardware fault, but so far undiagnosed.
> >
> > And now a few days ago the Xubuntu 12.04 desktop (fresh install a
> > month ago) locked up while streaming internet radio. Tonight it
> > stopped while watching a DVD. The audio continued, but the video
> > froze and the mouse and keyboard were dead.
> >
> > What is with my computers?
> 
> Be careful not to appear anxious around them. They have anxiety
> sensors in them that can cause all sorts of odd things.

Hm, it's a bit late in the month for the full moon to be causing
trouble, so it must be that other favorite random failure
generator, sunspots.  Or perhaps gremlins.  I've always favored
sunspots, though.  I've found the threat of being tortured to
death with a hot soldering iron to be surprisingly effective in
making a recalcitrant machine toe the line once more.

Geeky humour aside, John, this sounds rather like X11 has stopped
working.  That would account for the loss of video, as well as the
keyboard and mouse.  Have you checked your log files?  The one
most likely to have some useful information is /var/log/messages.
However, dmesg and ~/.xsession-errors may have something.

Can you log in (via ssh) to your desktop from the laptop?  If you
can, then, when the DVD player crashes, if you can still use your
network connection, you can check to see what has hung.  If it is
X, you can restart it.  Of course, if your network connection goes
south at the same time, then you know you've got something rather
more fundamental gone wrong.  On the other paw, it might be your
DVD player; which one are you using?  (Not likely, I admit, but it
is possible.)

For that matter, is the keyboard really hung?  Can you use
<alt><ctrl>F4 to switch to a VT?  This has happened to me, where
my keyboard appeared not to be working, but in fact it was just X.
If so, you could then find out what's going on from there, and
maybe get things running again.

Anyway, that's all I've got right now (unless you want more bad
jokes, of course).  We're probably going to need more information
from you to get a handle on this one.

Good Luck, and don't feed the gremlins.

--Dale

--
Penn's aunts made great apple pies at low prices.  No one else
in town could compete with the pie rates of Penn's aunts.



More information about the PLUG mailing list