knoppix v3.9 crashes

[kn]

System: Asrock K7S8X motherboard
AMD Athlon XP2600 processor
Matrox Mystique graphics card
256MB RAM
Maxtor Hard Drive
Samsung CDRW / DVD
On board sound / LAN
Microsoft PS/2 wheel mouse
Generic IEEE 1394 Firewire card.

Knoppix v3.9 boots fine to the desktop, but crashes very soon after - when I try to do anything ( eg
load mozilla / gimp / emacs). The mouse pointer / screen freezes and Ctrl-Alt-Esc , Ctrl-Alt-F1 ... Ctrl-AltF12, Ctrl-Alt-Del all have no effect, and I have to hit the reset button.

I have tried a some cheat codes at random ( including failsafe) - but without any success.
I have had similar results using v3.7 and v3.8 as well ( I have checked the MD5 checksum, and burnt the images
on the slowest setting available).

I'm not sure how to debug this,and would be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks.

[UnderScore]

It is probably related to your PC's HW versus Knoppix (Linux kernel). Me, I'm a Knoppix nut and have tried Knoppix on probably 30 different computers (friends PCs, relatives PC, PCs at work, my PCs) from 8 years old to brand new. I have never had a locked up desktop crash. I have seen one of my own PC (Asrock K7S41GX) do weird things (NIC would not work, 3x slower bootup) when APIC is turned on. I boot it with 'knoppix noapic' and that cleared it right up.
I hope this helps.
James

[pestie]

My desktop system does this, too. It's an Asus A7N8XE-Deluxe, Athlon 3200+. It'll be hummin' along just fine, then lock up hard - no mouse cursor or anything. It's kernel related, I'm sure, as I had the same problem with Ubuntu using the 2.6.11 kernel, but when I backed it off to 2.6.10 it was fine. I never narrowed it down any further than that. I'm planning on custom-compiling a 2.6.12 kernel soon. If I remember, I'll post the results here.

[rwcitek]

I have tried a some cheat codes at random ( including failsafe) - but without any success.
Your symptoms sound like a HW issue, in particular flakey RAM. Have you tried booting with "memtest"? What does it say?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

[pestie]

I've run several passes with memtest86+ on my box (I do that every time I get a new machine, new RAM, whatever - I never trust RAM) and haven't ever seen an error. At least in my case, the box runs Ubuntu/KDE and WinXP for days on end without a problem.

[rwcitek]

I've run several passes with memtest86+ on my box (I do that every time I get a new machine, new RAM, whatever - I never trust RAM) and haven't ever seen an error. At least in my case, the box runs Ubuntu/KDE and WinXP for days on end without a problem.
If your confident that you've ruled out the possiblity that RAM is the issue, then I'm curious to know, do you see the same issue if you run Knoppix entirely in text-mode? In other words, boot with boot: knoppix 3. Does Knoppix still freeze after using it a while without X running?

Also, have a look at the kernel parameters (http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Kernel-parameters-2.6.11) and 'sysctl -a' for options which may help you debug the problem.

Good luck and let us know what you discover.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

[kn]

An update...

I have tried noapic, noagp, nopcmcia etc - but it still crashes. These crashes occur very quickly after booting up into kde ( ie within minutes) - usually after i start an application such as gimp / mozilla ( it crashes while loading these applications, or loading a web page - while the "cursor" is bouncing). If I boot to the kde desktop and leave it alone, it will be fine for at least a few hours. As soon as I try to do anything within kde, it crashes very quickly.

I have run the memtest which was on the live cd, for about 6 hours, without any errors being reported. Is that long enough to rule out dodgy RAM, or should I run it for even longer?

I have tried a number of cheat codes from the FAQ ( eg vga=0, acpi=off pnpbios=off noapic noapm, etc) - but I still get the same result.

I have booted into runlevel 3 and it was ok for at least 1hour 40 minutes ( I wasn't doing much at the command line, since I'm very much a Linux newbie. I browsed through some directories, typed a perl one-liner to display some characters to the screen in a loop, dumped the output of sysctl -a to a file etc). I then typed init 5, and tried starting some application - and it crashed immediately!

The output from sysctl -a didn't make much sense to me...
Given that I can have the kde desktop running for a couple of hours ( doing nothing, but the clock display updates), does that rule out any 'x' issues?
I think it might be crashing while trying to read the data from the cd...

Would appreciate any more suggestions on things to try. Thanks again...

[rwcitek]

I think it might be crashing while trying to read the data from the cd...
Have you tested the CD? That is, have you booted with boot: knoppix testcd ?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

[kn]

When I type: "knoppix testcd", I get the message: "Everything looks ok", and then it boots
into kde.

Something I just noticed in the boot up messages was something like: "found pcmcia, starting cardmgr" - I'm not
sure what it has found ( I thought pcmcia relates to laptops? I have a desktop pc). Not sure if this is significant...