Help diagnosing laptop lockups?

doug-b · n00b Joined: 17 Oct 2003 Posts: 1 Location: Houston, TX

Hi all,

Could someone please tell me how I should go about diagnosing lockups under Gentoo on my laptop? I am getting about one freeze per day, and don't know where to start. Details:

I have Gentoo installed on my Dell Inspiron 5000E, PIII 850. It is all up to date with the latest stable Gentoo packages for 2.4 kernel, Gnome 2.4 with xscreensaver, Evolution 1.4.5 etc. I even got direct rendering working with my ATI Rage 128 Mobility. However... I get these lockups.

The typical symptoms are that I return after leaving the machine unattended to find the fan running full, and it has frozen up, usually with a dark screen. Keystrokes don't change anything, so I have to hold the power button for a few seconds to power it off and then restart. It normally seems pretty hot whenever I discover it locked up.

I don't want to give up on Gentoo because I really like the resonsiveness and the Gnome 2.4 environment. Therefore I welcome any help in working through this problem.

Thanks,
Doug

scr7b · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 12 Location: Scotland

I have one suggestion... Do you have a SSH daemon running on it?

If so, you could leave it running with a "top" window opened on another system via SSH, and see if there's a process appearing which takes 100% CPU load. Maybe if the keyboard on the system is not responding, you might be able to do something with it via SSH, and kill the rogue process to see if the system wakes up. I'm thinking if your fan is running full whack and the system is hot, there's something taking up a lot of CPU...

Good luck!

zebbedi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Sep 2003 Posts: 123

I have a inspiron 5000e and experienced lockups after install. I think it was due to the ACPI option, i left it turned on, but from what ive read it should be off.

Annoying thing was that after the 3rd lockup, the laptop is now totally fried. It will no longer boot, it turns on for 2 seconds, flicks itself off, then turns itself back on again, doing this in an infinite loop until i unplug the battery. No display is shown and dont even get as far as num lock lights flashing etc.

Ive tried removing dvd drive, hdd, batteries, removed/replace ram, removed/replaced cpu and still same problem.

As much as i hate to admit it, I used redhat on this laptop for about 3 years before with no problems.

Not sure if it was a gentoo thing, but im now laptopless

So i installed gentoo on my main pc instead, and had no problems