What makes Ubuntu crash? I try to isolate the problem
In case you were wondering, yes it does occur to me that all the time I'm spending trying to figure out why Ubuntu is crashing (or why my Debian Lenny screen slowly degrades during each computing session) is time better spent finding a system that does work and presents none of these problems.
That's why I'm running the currently trouble-free CentOS 5.2 as my secondary distro on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.
I've already gone into way too much depth about how I feel about Debian and Ubuntu (very positive, despite all of these problems). With different hardware, I could very well throw Debian Lenny (or Ubuntu Hardy) on the box and have none of my current problems.
And while I'm getting to the point of swapping out my main computer for something from my well-populated boneyard, the Gateway MUST remain in service.
Anyway, back to my Ubuntu 8.04 problem. What happens is that the screen, keyboard and mouse seem to freeze at random. When the freeze happens, the screen image at that particular moment continues to display, but neither movement of the mouse nor typing on the keyboard has any affect whatsoever. Ctrl-alt-backspace won't kill X, ctrl-alt-delete won't reboot the box. I have to hold down the power button and force the machine to turn off.
The first thing I did today was install the Fluxbox window manager. I booted into Fluxbox, and things seemed to be OK, except that loading Nautilus caused GNOME to halfway take over, change my wallpaper and kill out the Fluxbox menu but not replace it with the GNOME menu. Ctrl-alt-backspace worked there. And when the screen saver did turn on, half the time I could get the desktop back, the other half I had to ctrl-alt-backspace and log in again.
In the middle of all this, I installed the rox-filer file manager, which let me navigate among my files without screwing things up with Nautilus, but the screen-saver issue was a deal-breaker.
Then I installed the Xubuntu-desktop meta-package, which brings in the full Xubuntu environment to Ubuntu, including apps like Abiword and the full Xfce desktop.
I'm in there now, using Firefox 3 to write this entry in the Xfce environment. I'll see how the screen-saver does its thing here and whether or not I get a random freeze.
So if GNOME is the culprit, I'll know by the end of today.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
The Nautilus taking over your desktop is a 'feature' of Nautilus and will occur on any distro with any window manager if you just run 'nautilus'. What you want to do is create a shortcut or something in your fluxbox menu that executes 'nautilus --no-desktop' and then only the file manager will load. It may default to standard GNOME icons and theme etc., which you can easily fix by creating your custom ~/.gtkrc and ~/.gtkrc-mine files. There are gui tools that do this, such as gtk-chtheme and gtk-theme-switch. Anyway, I digress... :-)
Nautilus defaults to taking over your desktop and managing your background etc. Using 'nautilus --no-desktop' will solve that problem.
I'd just as soon not use Nautilus when not in GNOME.
I'm running the box with the Xubuntu environment now. I thought about just bringing in Xfce, but I figured I go the whole Xubuntu way.
There was a time on my old VIA test box where I preferred running Xubuntu over Ubuntu. I think Xubuntu hit quite a sweet spot at version 6.10 in terms of usability and design. I started to have problems with Xubuntu around 7.04 and pretty much turned to Debian, Slackware and Wolvix for my Xfce use, but so far it's nice to be back in Xfce with Xubuntu 8.04.
I've written many times before about how I don't see much of a speed advantage using Xubuntu over Ubuntu. It's one of those things: If you like Xfce, use Xubuntu. When the hardware gets a bit marginal, it might make a difference to run Xfce instead of GNOME, and the differences are a bit more apparent in Debian (vs. GNOME) and Slackware (vs. KDE) than in Ubuntu/Xubuntu, which have more of the same underlying code and don't differ much at all in terms of performance.
Of course I've always found that Ubuntu (with GNOME) tends to be less buggy than Xubuntu (with Xfce), but this time my own personal (or so it seems) Ubuntu bug has driven me toward Xubuntu to see if something in GNOME is what's causing my random X/keyboard/mouse crashes.
Thus far I've had screen-saver trouble: Just like in Ubuntu, when I close the lid in Xubuntu (with the system set to "blank the screen" with that action), I get an X crash. I can recover with ctrl-alt-backspace, but it's still annoying.
I don't expect lid-closing to work on this laptop, even though it does fine in some distros.
But if I can go a few days in Xubuntu without the screen freezing, I'll have made progress on what's ailing this Ubuntu/Xubuntu installation.
When the screen freezes, are you still able to log in via SSH? It might help diagnose what's going on, or at least give you a more graceful way of shutting it down.
I'll have to look into setting up the laptop for remote logins via SSH. That's a very good idea. I do that with OpenBSD and Debian installs all the time, but never in Ubuntu.
An excellent idea -- thanks!
I just found another way around the reset button here: http://tips4linux.com/force-a-clean-reboot-when-the-system-freezes/
Hold down the Alt and SysRq keys and press this sequence:
R E I S U B
I have a Fujitsu $0 laptop that is freezing and doesn't respond over SSH. I'm hoping to try this tonight.