Periodic Fedora 9 system hangs with jumpy mouse

Deron Meranda deron.meranda at gmail.com
Tue Jun 24 17:21:23 UTC 2008


I have reinstalled Fedora 9 (not an upgrade) onto a system that used
to run F7 fine
(except for a new video card, see below).

Now I am seeing intermittent system hangs or lockups; probably about 2
or 3 per day.
This happens most often if I'm scrolling a page in Firefox with the
mouse wheel, but
it has happened a few other times too.  Usually when this happens I'm
doing very little
other than viewing a webpage or typing at the terminal shell.  No
music or video is playing;
screen saver is not running.  Usually the only major apps in use when
this happens
are Firefox, Thunderbird, terminals, and emacs.  I have not enabled
any of the Gnome
desktop effects.

When the system hangs, the mouse cursor will continue to move, but it
is very jumpy
and sluggish.  But otherwise the system is completely unresponsive
(not just slow).
Nothing visible on the screen updates at all, mouse clicks are not
registered, keyboard
input does nothing.  I can not even switch out to a console window, or
any of the
ctrl+alt sequences. The only thing I can do is to do a hard power-off
and reboot.

When the system comes back up I can not find any information about what may
have happened.  Log files just go silent at the instant the hang occurs.

All F9 updates are applied.  Running kernel 2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686.  No custom
drivers or packages, and very little customization...mainly
out-of-the-box Fedora.
This system is a Dell Optiplex GX270 (4-5 yrs old) with a Pentium 4 3GHz cpu
with hyperthreading enabled, 1 MB ram.  I am using LVM and LUKS encryption
on the swap and /home.

The only hardware change in the system was replacing my old PCI graphics
card (Matrox Millenium II) with a brand new ATI Stealth X1050 AGP.  This was
necessary because the F9 graphical install was unusable; as the old card only
had VGA output and the installer's X11 could not properly auto-detect the LCD
widescreen monitor and was trying to drive it at too high a frequency.  I needed
to have DVI output for the F9 graphical install to work; so I had to get a new
video card.

Does anybody have any ideas what might be happening; and is there anything
I can do to help diagnose this problem or obtain more information that may
be useful?
-- 
Deron Meranda




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