7.0-BETA1 & 2 occasionally freezing, how to diagnose?

[Doug Poland]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 02:07:46PM -0800, Karol Mroz wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Doug Poland wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've been having frequent problems with BETA1 and now BETA2
> > "freezing".  There is no diagnostic information, nothing in
> > /var/log/messages, nothing, just a hung interface.  I cannot ssh
> > into the machine and it appears the box ceases to communicate on
> > SSH. A couple of times I've had screen corruption on the laptop's
> > LCD display.
> > 
> > Every time it hands I'm running Xorg 7.3, Thunderbird, Firefox,
> > pidgin, and a bunch of xterms.
> > 
> > Is there something I can do to diagnose this issue?
> > 
> 
> Have you just migrated to CURRENT? Was this machine running fine under
> STABLE?
> 
I moved from 6.2-STABLE to 7.0-BETA using cvsup.  I may had an
infrequent problem in the 6.2-STABLE days, but I can't recall with
certainty. 

> I had similar problems with a desktop of mine that was running 6.2.
> Every now and then (sometimes days in between) it would freeze in X,
> corrupt the screen, or at times would just reboot. There was no warning
> and nothing of worth in any log files. 
>
pretty much my experience here, except I have a laptop.

> I had a feeling it might have been my video card, so after taxing it
> really hard with gl apps and noticing artifacts on the screen, I
> replaced the card. The system ran well for a few weeks, but the
> problems persisted. Thought at this point it could be faulty ram, so
> ran each half-gig stick on it's own until the next failure. Both
> sticks showed failures. So then I moved the sticks out of slots 1,2
> and into 3,4... that was 4 months ago and all is well.
> 
I suppose I could run memtest, although the RAM in this laptop was
replaced in July (now running 4GB).

> I guess what I'm aiming at here is that this could be a hardware issue
> which can be a pain to diagnose.
> 
Thanks for the suggestion.

-- 
Regards,
Doug