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What should I do when Ubuntu freezes?

I've got Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. and I'm new to Ubuntu. I have problems with crashes that occur semi-randomly.

  • Sometimes when I start Ubuntu, both browsers (Firefox and Chrome) fail to load. Chrome gives “Aw Snap!” on every site and Firefox exits giving an error. Then I restart Ubuntu and everything is normal. Why does it fail to start when I start ubuntu for the first time?

  • Sometimes I get “System Program Problem Detected”. I even performed sudo rm /var/crash/*. It disappers on restart but it then comes back again.

Should I check if my all packages are properly installed? How?

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  • You need to be clear enough , if any errors , pls post the EXACT errors , a screenshot maybe.
    – atenz
    Jul 12, 2012 at 17:58
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    Also, if each issue is with a different program, then you should ask for support in each one specifically. As for the crash, did you file a crash report?
    – Thomas Ward ♦
    Jul 12, 2012 at 18:03
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    sunny, welcome to AskUbuntu! It's a good practice to ask just one thing per question, to get best answers to all of them! I suggest you split up these 3 into separate questions.
    – Rafał Cieślak
    Jul 12, 2012 at 18:21

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Run a memory test. At the boot menu, instead of picking Ubuntu or Windows, pick “Memory test”. See Faulty hardware in the Ubuntu community documentation for more details. If you don't get a boot menu, see configuring Grub2 for how to enable it.

Seriously. Linux is pretty demanding on the RAM. RAM tends to fail in subtle ways: if you write a value to a location and read it later, it comes out right — except when you've done a very particular sequence of writes and you happen to read at exactly the wrong time. I've seen computers that seemed to run Windows just fine, and even ran some applications under Linux — but start using Firefox (which uses a lot of RAM), and the crashes would come. I ran a memory test, which showed a single failure; I replaced the RAM sticks, and that machine ran without rebooting for the next year or so.

The crash reports in /var/crash are just that: crash reports. They are a consequence of the crashes, not a cause. They might help in diagnosing what is wrong; but if it's failing RAM, the crashes tend to look pretty random.

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