Ubuntu Intrepid Stack up

abrenar

My friends Ubuntu Intrepid box is experiencing stack up when he left his computer in screensaver mode, when activating it again the desktop will appear but nothing follows, so he need to reset his cpu from the power button "hardware" to activate again his desktop, any ideas? did you experience it ?

Thanks In advance.

masinick

Is a "Stack up" the same thing as the system effectively "hung" - that is, no processes will run?

Does the system respond to a Ctrl-Alt-F2, that is, switching to command console 2? Is the system completely frozen?

Is there any way, either by switching to a console, or by examining after the fact, any log messages to get an idea what is going on?

The files in /var/log can give you some idea of what is happening, beginning with /var/log/dmesg to see messages during the booting process, /var/log/messages to see the messages that are recorded, /var/log/boot to see boot messages, and so on. Poke around there and get some ideas.
/var/log/syslog is there as well, so check out all the logs you see there, should be educational.

abrenar

thanks Brian i will check my logs when it happens againe, but what if i cannot switch to another console what should i gonna do?

masinick

If you cannot get to the console, you may have to boot/reboot, then don't pause, look there right away.

dmesg usually only has the current session, but most logs have 3-4 versions, so you can look back to previous logs to see what has been going on.

In the worst case, add a S to the boot command line and boot Single User, then you can get to /var/log to examine it.