Fedora 16: freezes every day!

[Axel79]

While I'm working, or simply reading a pdf, while I'm scrolling a photo album or opening a directory: simply freezed.
No way to recover, the only possibility is to use the power button.
I don't know if it can be a graphic card problem, I've an ATI mobility radeon HD5850.....

Can anybody help me to investigate?

Thank you all.

[juanmaaaaa]

I have been having exactly the same problems, I'm in facebook or listening to music and the cursor stops moving and i have to restart my machine.... This is my hardware:
Processor: AMD TF-20
RAM: 4GB
Motherboard: It's a Clevo laptop.
Video (the most interesting) ATI Mobility Radeon HD X1270
HDD: 250GB SATA 2.
Audio: Realtek ALC272.

I'm a total noob..... waiting for somebody with experience to reply

[robert4man]

Same problem. I have an HP Pavilion Elite HPE-250f which has a Radeon HD 5700 Series video card. It seems to be triggered by a mouse event: select window, scroll, resize window, etc. I'm still investigating. I plan to ssh into my box from another machine the next time it happens to look around. I'm running the open source radeon driver. I tried switching over to the catalyst driver from rpmfusion, but it was completely unusable for me.

[akvasu]

Hi

I see the problem on Thinkpad W510 with Nvidia chipset - and using the novueau driver....

I also feel it happens at some random mouse event... However I had seen it 3 times when I was trying to set the screen brightness....

Disabling ALL extensions and moving to a base F16 seems to have reduced the issue....

Thanks
Anup

[flyingfsck]

Check the log files. That is the only clue you'll get:
# tail -n 10000 /varlog/messages | less

Otherwise, open your junk box and start swapping things. I'll start with the power supply. Change it, wait a few days and see if the problem happens again.

If you have a desktop machine, check the electrolytic capacitors on the mother board. If any one of them is distended or spouting brown goop, then you need a new mother board.

[robert4man]

This happened to me again yesterday after my post (a few times). I tried connecting via ssh from another machine and couldn't connect. I couldn't even ping my machine any longer. It seems this is more than a GUI thing. The machine is completely frozen. Impossible to access dmesg at this point and nothing interesting in /var/log/messages prior to the forced reboot. I don't believe I have any gnome 3 extensions installed, but I'll have to double check that Monday. I know the hardware is good. Never had any issue under F14, and I did a clean install of F16. I may try a serial console next. I have also installed the kernel-debug package. I haven't seen this issue at all on my laptop. Only my desktop machine. Still researching.

[akvasu]

Hi

I faced an issue on similar lines today - My windows all got frozen but I was able to move the mouse... I did CTRL+ALT+F2 to get to text mode - I think gnome-session was stuck for me - was forced to kill it... I was trying to do 'metacity replace' which usually used to recover stuck Gnome Sessions but I wasn't able to figure out my display since I had an external monitor connected as well... So I managed to restart gnome-shell and had to login again... But it was better than a Hard restart...

Thanks
Anup

[et3rn1ty]

I'm kinda new to fedora but have been using linux for years, and I'm really baffled by this bug:

At first, it happened when I was watching a video on youtube. I thought, well, flash sucked and always will
But then, it kept on happening again and again, with random programs, at random points: first Epiphany, then the pdf reader...

Using the non-graphical displays doesn't work (ctrl+alt+F2 etc) and all I can do is restart the system. I'm not really willing to read through 3000 lines of log data, if you want to I can post my /var/log/messages

Anyone has any solutions?

Otherwise, open your junk box and start swapping things. I'll start with the power supply. Change it, wait a few days and see if the problem happens again.

If you have a desktop machine, check the electrolytic capacitors on the mother board. If any one of them is distended or spouting brown goop, then you need a new mother board.

My hardware seems fine, it hosted a number of linux distros before, including Debian, Arch, Ubuntu and more

[marko]

My hardware seems fine, it hosted a number of linux distros before, including Debian, Arch, Ubuntu and more

"before" doesn't really mean much, hardware can fail at any time.

1) try using memtest86+ to test the memory
2) visual inspection as suggested in post #5
3) for a while, run a different desktop, if you usually run Gnome, try XFCE for a while. If the problems go away it's specific to your old desktop
4) after you reboot the machine, run 'abrt-gui' to see what the Automatic bug detection and reporting tool
says
5) video card hardware can cause the kind of hang you have, try running your video in vesa mode as a test. It will be slower but it uses the video card in a different way, if the system becomes more stable you could have a bad video card
6) make sure you occasionally check your cpu and hardware temperatures with lm_sensors, you can install that package, then run sensors-detect to configure it. Running "sensors" from the command line will list out the temps or you can use gkrellm or various other plugins to have them show on the desktop all the time. Having a crash when playing movies might be due to overheating. This isn't really consistent with your saying it's now occurring at random times. It's possible that overheating something for a long time has damaged the hardware and now it crashes in general

[fmitterb]

Same problem here!

I have a dual-boot desktop system (Intel Core i7-930, 12GB RAM and a ATI radeon HD5800). Booting Windows 7 and everything is just fine (programming, gaming, youtube, ...) - so I think my hardware is pretty fine. The Fedora installation is a fresh one - i wiped out the old fedora 15 installation completely before installing the new fedora 16.

Booting fedora 16 and it is likely to freeze at least once a day (no exaggeration!)
The system is really dead in that case - the only solution is to press the reset button.

I think the problem is caused by the graphics-acceleration as i have a fedora 16 installation in a Virtual Machine without graphics acceleration on my Windows-Machine too - this one runs stable (ok, i did not use it that much, but during the time i was using the VM the original installation would have freezed at least twice).

[Dutchy]

I'm seeing these symptoms with one of my machine.
It freezes about one time a week and so far only while using Libre Office.
It seems to happen when doing something (too) quick in a context menu, then it will hang completely and as far as I can tell there is no way to recover and no log messages.
The strange thing is that it only happens with Libre Office, other things like browsing, flash and 3d Virtualbox doesn't seem affected.
(Un)fortunately I can't reproduce it.
My guess is that it is Xorg and graphic driver related.

[akvasu]

Hi

I am seeing this problem regularly on my Thinkpad W510.... Its definitely not hardware related since my HDD has been switched to 3 different laptops over the last 2 weeks....

I've seen the problem almost all the times i've tried to increase the Brightness...

Thanks
anup

[robert4man]

Has anyone noticed an improvement when using Forced Fallback Mode? I'm trying that now.

[robert4man]

This may be a little premature, but Forced Fallback Mode seems to have resolved the issue for me. Things haven't hard locked since. It's only been a couple of days, but this was happening at least once a day (sometimes three or four) before.

[bryanoftexas]

Happens once an hour for me.

I'm on a Toshiba satellite L645D. I'm trying that forced fallback mode now and will update on that later. It'd be a shame to lose the functionality of the default shell.

To those suggesting this is a hardware failure problem: by now n (sample size) is statistically large enough to discount the idea that this is merely the problem of someone's hardware failing.

---------- Post added at 04:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:58 PM ----------

Just froze with forced fallback.

There really isn't a correlation with actions on screen for me, so I suspect it's hardware incompatibility somewhere.