Crashing tips?

[Youssef Makki]

First thing I did before installing Fedora was read the #fedora faq on
freenode, which pointed me to a few known issues like with 3com cards
and kudzu. Next thing I did was spend some time on bugzilla regarding
bugs that could be specific or applicable in my case.

When I decided I wanted to 'learn' Linux a couple of years ago, I
reinstalled Redhat 7.2 on my gateway at home, and chose no extra
packages whatsoever, plain simple ~500mb install. From that point on,
anytime I'd need something I'd have to install the appropriate package
and figure out how it works. I think that's what helped me most, and I
highly recommend doing that on a pc you will need regularly; that'll
push you to fix it. Learn vi and you can do anything from that point on.
Avoid gui configuration tools for now, if you plan on migrating quite a
few PCs to Linux, that means remote administration, which in turn means
vi and ssh. Sure there's vnc and all that, but the bottom line is when I
want to restart httpd on a server, I'm not gonna start a vnc session for
that.

This is my very humble opinion.



On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 15:30, Matt Morgan wrote:
> I'm fishing for some ideas about where to start diagnosing a 
> mostly-random crashing problem.
> 
> First off, let me say this is a 2.8Ghz hyperthreading pentium 4, 512 Mb 
> of DDR400 ram, an Asus motherboard (not sure of the exact model), a WD 
> 80 gb drive, and a Sony CRX225 CD-RW. I have a 3COM 3C905b 100baseT 
> network card (there's also an SiS adapter built-in that I don't use), 
> and an ATI Radeon 9200SE video adapter. The sound built-in to the 
> motherboard appears to be a SiS i810_audio.
> 
> This is a fairly new computer for me, I've had it maybe 10 days. I've 
> only been a Fedora user for about a week more than that (temporarily 
> used a different computer before getting this one). For a couple days 
> after installing FC1 on this computer, it ran very well, except that I 
> couldn't get XFree86 to deal properly with the video; it would only work 
> on Generic VESA, not with the Radeon 9200 driver. Then I set up yum and 
> turned on nightly updates; the next morning the computer froze, just 
> after login, while KDE was starting up. During rebooting, kudzu found 
> the video adapter and set it up for me. So now all the hardware is 
> properly identified and working, and I thought, great! That's worth one 
> measly crash.
> 
> Only the thing is, now it tends to crash a lot. Almost every day since, 
> the computer is either frozen when I come to work in the morning, or 
> freezes during KDE startup, just after I login. Then less often, it just 
> freezes in the middle of working. For example, it froze when I tried to 
> tell Firefox 0.8 to use gpdf instead of xpdf to open a pdf--just 
> clicking on the "Other ..." button froze everything. Then this morning, 
> it froze in the middle of typing an email message in Thunderbird 0.5.
> 
> I wanted to blame it on yum, thinking it didn't happen until I set up 
> nightly yum updates. But it happens even during mornings that yum 
> installed nothing overnight. So that seems like a red herring.
> 
> My primary goal in diagnosing this problem is not just to fix this one 
> computer. I plan to switch my entire organization to linux over the next 
> couple years, and I need to get a better idea of how to diagnose 
> crashing on linux desktops. So my real question is: when your computer 
> crashes, what tools, and what steps, do you use to diagnose the 
> problem(s). You know, what log files, what common culprits, etc. Of 
> course, if you have specific suggestions about how to fix this 
> particular computer, I'm all ears for that, too.
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> Matt