Intermittent freezing

[gloken]

Howdy. I'm new to Fedora, I moved over from Ubuntu on my home pc very recently because I really don't like the direction they've been going.

I've got a fresh install of Fedora 16 (Gnome) now.

I'm having intermittent freezing at the desktop. Randomly during use the mouse pointer, sound and display will all freeze and the machine will stop responding to any input devices. It happens within an hour of active use most times, and otherwise there's no common trend.

Has anyone else had this issue? My first thought was to check heat and make sure that my CPU wasn't just getting toasty, but there's no single temperature where it runs into issues. I'd love to adopt Fedora, but this one is going to be a death blow if I can't resolve it.

[PiElle]

I'm experimenting the same "intermittent freezing" too.
I don't know if the problem depends on Gnome 3 or on kernel-3.2.2-1.fc16.i686.
May be both ...

[glennzo]

I'm getting the same thing. It only happens to me when running Fedora 16 or Arch, both using Gnome3 and friends. The same machine running other Redhat based distros like Centos, Scientific, Fedora 14 with legacy Gnome, Fedora 15 with early Gnome 3, Mint with Cinnamon (is that what that desktop is called?) and Windows 7 don't lock up.

[PiElle]

In my machine Windows 7 and Mageia 1 (running in triple boot) don't lock up as well ...
I have to add that in Fedora 16 I'm having a lot of Firefox crashes (these began a few days ago ...)

[gloken]

It's starting to sound like I should try something else before I get too vested in this.
I was hoping for something more stable and less flashy and experimental than Ubuntu.

[glennzo]

Hmm... I forgot my main point. Given my statements in my previous post, in my opinion it's a Gnome 3 issue and not a hardware issue.

[PiElle]

Originally Posted by glennzo

Hmm... I forgot my main point. Given my statements in my previous post, in my opinion it's a Gnome 3 issue and not a hardware issue.

Probably it is!

[ShivaS]

I noticed today that atheros wireless driver was the cause of F16 random crashes. I removed the PCMCIA card and no more hard resets for my laptop.

[Chilly Willy]

I'm not saying that it can't be something else, but given all the issues with the 3.2.x kernels, I think I'd be rolling it back to 3.1.9 (or whatever) if nothing else than to rule it out.

[RupertPupkin]

It may be the 3.2.2 kernel. I've had a similar problem with the keyboard not responding sometimes at the login screen, and unplugging and plugging it back in didn't work. This only started with the 3.2.2 kernel, and has only happened twice. But that's enough to make me suspicious, since it never happened before (and the keyboard is fine).

[DBelton]

with Gnome 3 and F16, you have the tracker program that fires up every so often and indexes your files.

I ran (from a terminal window signed in as my user)

gnome-session-properties

This allowed me to prevent some of the applications from starting when Gnome did.

I stopped all of the at-spi stuff (I don't use the assistive technologies), all if the input method stuff, and all of the tracker stuff.

After stopping tracker, my desktop smoothed out and hasn't caused an issue since.

Edit:

I have also had an issue since the 3.2.2 kernel similar to Rupert above, except mine is my mouse, not keyboard. Just every once in awhile when I start up, I have no mouse. A reboot usually fixes it. (Next time it occurs, I will see if I can look in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and see what happened. I'll also try just killing/restarting X and see if that fixes it instead of a reboot)

[Chilly Willy]

I'm still using 3.1.9 & refused the kernel updates & it's associated stuff (given all the problems being reported - I updated everything else though) & so far, haven't had any issues. (other than what I had to start with)

[glennzo]

Originally Posted by DBelton

with Gnome 3 and F16, you have the tracker program that fires up every so often and indexes your files.

I ran (from a terminal window signed in as my user)

gnome-session-properties

This allowed me to prevent some of the applications from starting when Gnome did.

I stopped all of the at-spi stuff (I don't use the assistive technologies), all if the input method stuff, and all of the tracker stuff.

After stopping tracker, my desktop smoothed out and hasn't caused an issue since.

Edit:

I have also had an issue since the 3.2.2 kernel similar to Rupert above, except mine is my mouse, not keyboard. Just every once in awhile when I start up, I have no mouse. A reboot usually fixes it. (Next time it occurs, I will see if I can look in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log file and see what happened. I'll also try just killing/restarting X and see if that fixes it instead of a reboot)

I like your ideas. I'm going to stop some or all of those applications and see if it makes any difference for me. As far as I'm concerned, excellent information. Thank you.

[PiElle]

On a different notebook, I run Fedora 16 KDE.
It locks up all the time running kernel-3.2.2-1.fc16.i686!
So, in my opinion, the issue is not Gnome related.
Now I'm running 3.1.9-1.fc16.i686 or 3.2.1-3.fc16.i686 without any problem: the machine has been working for some days, without even shutting down and rebooting (I use to put it in stand - by mode).
So I suppose the problem depends on kernel-3.2.2-1.fc16.i686 ...

[DBelton]

Originally Posted by glennzo

I like your ideas. I'm going to stop some or all of those applications and see if it makes any difference for me. As far as I'm concerned, excellent information. Thank you.

I am a firm believer in not running applications unless I use them or they are really necessary. Now as to whether this will fix your problems, who knows, but stopping unnecessary/unused programs can only be beneficial