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I have a certain Java program that occasionally causes Ubuntu to crash. The sound gets stuck on a short loop, the screen output actually ceases (i.e. monitor can find no input and turns off) and no keyboard or mouse inputs work. I have to restart it from the physical power button. My question isn't how to fix it because I don't know what is actually happening. I would like to know what logs or logging programs I could look at to get any information on why this is happening. It would be useful information to include in a bug report to whomever it may concern.

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What to do with questions that describe known bugs? and as such is now closed. – Marco Ceppi♦ Feb 1 '12 at 23:44

closed as off topic by Marco Ceppi♦ Feb 1 '12 at 23:44

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2 Answers

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There are a number of Java apps that don't run perfect under the OpenJDK JVM included with Ubuntu. You may want to try installing the Sun Java JVM and see if this resolves your problem.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Java

There are a number of system logs you can look through also, but I don't recall their locations.

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It turns out I already had Sun's version installed, but not set as default. I will see if this helps. – Echogene Jun 4 '11 at 10:31
It didn't help. Oh well. – Echogene Jun 4 '11 at 17:52
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Look at /var/log/messages as starting point. If java is crashing it will generate an error some thing similar as below

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0xf3c1501d, pid=1393, tid=3852467056
#
# JRE version: 6.0_23-b05
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (19.0-b09 mixed mode linux-x86 )

detailed crash logs will be named like this err_pidxxx.log, but I believe the logging will be controlled by your settings.

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I can't find /var/log/messages and err_pidxx.log. I looked at syslog and the last thing that was logged there before I pressed the power button was NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context. I take it that this is from my Nvidia driver, in which case, assuming this lead to the crash, Java's using of the graphics card lead to the driver`s crashing. I will have to see if it crashes again and leaves the same message before making any other guesses. – Echogene Jun 4 '11 at 10:29

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