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Six months ago, I bought a new Sandy Bridge CPU and built myself a nice desktop machine. Until now it hasn't worked...at all. I finally have gotten it working now that Oneiric is released, but it freezes every so often, making it little more than a semi-functional temptation.

What happens when the system freezes is:

  • the music I have playing enters into about 5s loops.
  • SSH fails
  • the monitor freezes
  • the mouse freezes
  • the keyboard fails

The only way to fix it is to do a hard reset...and that sucks.

I'd love to at least figure out the source of the freeze so I can file a bug. I've looked in dmesg, kern.log, and the X.org logs. Nothing interesting is any of them.

Since SSH fails, I'm convinced it's not an X crash: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze

Anything else I can do?

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Have you updated to latest updates? My Nautilus was almost unusable towards release but after few updates after release it is stable now. – Stefano Oct 21 '11 at 5:32
All updates are applied, yes. – mlissner Oct 21 '11 at 6:10
have you tried reset Unity settings (unity --reset) if you use unity? – Stefano Oct 21 '11 at 7:49
Have you tried the magic SysReq + REISUB sequence? (If it doesn't work then the keyboard really is broken, but I on my machine have had a few different types of crashes, some of which have the keyboard still working at the lowest level and some which don't - generally only once or twice per type that I've ever seen, over more than two years, though I've had a new type of crash which drops to showing the kernel log today, twice, which I've never seen before, and it's really dead.) – Chris Morgan Oct 21 '11 at 13:18
Haven't tried the SysReq + REISUB sequence. I'll try it next time, but I'm not hopeful. – mlissner Oct 21 '11 at 15:47

closed as too localized by Jorge Castro, Marco Ceppi♦ Dec 22 '11 at 13:48

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

It appears I had a bad RAM chip. Yesterday it finally wouldn't boot at all without panicking.

Wish there was a lesson to learn here. Don't trust hardware?

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up vote 0 down vote

You are most likely getting a kernel panic. Check your /var/log/kern.log after crash.

There are some nice instructions on how to collect a kernel panic over dump over the network at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Netconsole

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He says that he's looked in kern.log. – Chris Morgan Oct 21 '11 at 13:14
It doesn't hurt to double check :) Anyway the kernel dump may not be flushed to disk, that is why the NetConsole is handy. – João Pinto Oct 21 '11 at 13:26
Yeah, nothing in kern.log so far, and I've triple checked. I'll set up netconsole, and will report back whether it logs anything interesting. – mlissner Oct 21 '11 at 15:47
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netconsole is running...now just have to wait for the crash. I'll start some important work. That usually does the trick – mlissner Oct 21 '11 at 16:20

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