Hi. This is a first post for me. I’ve tried to get answers elsewhere and haven’t had any luck whatsoever. However, at this point, I’ve put more thought into it and perhaps someone here can give me a clue.
A little information about my machine first:
OS: openSUSE 11
Processor: AMD Athlon 32 bit
Motherboard chipset: nVidia nForce 2
Video card: nVidia 6200 (eVGA)
Sound card: SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Digital
Memory: 2gb 400MHz SDRAM (2*1gb)
My machine locks up. Not always and not with every window manager. Windowmaker, FVWM, TWM and IceWM, for instance, can run without the machine ever locking up. However, even with those, I can get it to lock up by using, say, certain KDE4 applications, like dolphin, konqueror, kmail, amarok and even konsole. I’ve been using Enlightenment recently (mainly because I am so sick of those first WMs that I mentioned), and it will last for quite a while, but it *will *eventually lock up. Sometimes it’s when I can’t avoid using KDE4 applications or prefer them over any other so well that I risk it, and occasionally, all I’m running is Firefox and urxvt. At first, I tried using ROX with Enlightenment, but that would lock up very quickly every time. Running the full KDE4 never gives me more than ten minutes. Gnome is the same. KDE3 seems to last a little longer. The funny thing about that is that my mother, who has her own user and only uses my machine for simple games like solitaire and mahjongg, was running KDE3 all the time without a single lockup for a very long time after I started having this trouble with my user. And I did not change any of her settings. Neither did she. All of her games have icons on the desktop and that is all that’s all that’s on them. She doesn’t mess with anything else. However, recently it began happening to her, too, so she just uses my user and I put it on Windowmaker with some icons laid out for her on the clip. Now, because she wasn’t having this trouble, I thought it might be because of my user settings. I tried to work with them in so many ways that I can’t even remember them all. I stopped programs and services, I changed configurations, I hacked config files with grep and vi. I deleted files so they would be created again. I even renamed my .kde and .kde4 directories several times (which I hate doing because I like everything just so). Finally, I made a new user for myself, only migrating my Documents folder. With a brand new user, it continues to happen.
Now, when I say it locks up, I mean no mouse movement, no graphical movement on the screen, and no possible key combination will even restart the computer. I have to do a hard reboot every time. Occasionally, I’ll run fsck and I know that it will find a bunch of errors, so I just set it to autofix them and walk away because it’s too painful to watch. And it takes too long.
I’ve been trying to diagnose hardware problems myself ever since this started happening, around the beginning of the year. I can’t quite recall when it started happening because at first, it was rare enough that I just thought that some piece of software was buggy, like a desktop widget or something (I was only using KDE4 at that time). Also around the beginning of the year, I made some hardware changes. So I’ll talk about those in a moment.
First, I wanted to state that almost every messages file in /var/log since the beginning of the year ends with the same thing. Here’s the output of tail from one of them from February:
Feb 16 21:45:12 god****maddog kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
Feb 16 21:45:13 god****maddog su: (to beagleindex) root on none
Feb 16 21:45:13 god****maddog kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
Feb 16 21:45:52 god****maddog syslog-ng[2062]: last message repeated 106 times
Feb 16 21:45:52 god****maddog kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
Feb 16 21:46:11 god****maddog syslog-ng[2062]: last message repeated 51 times
Feb 16 21:46:11 god****maddog syslog-ng[2062]: SIGHUP received, restarting syslog-ng
Feb 16 21:46:11 god****maddog kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
Feb 16 21:46:11 god****maddog kernel: klogd 1.4.1, ---------- state change ----------
Feb 16 21:46:12 god****maddog kernel: hub 6-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
Now, for the hardware part.
The output of tail above mentions the USB port, so let’s start with that. One of the hardware changes I made somewhere around the beginning of the year was to install a four-port USB card. This is because I didn’t have enough ports and because the built-in USB had been getting a little flaky with my USB keyboards (mainly the two Microsoft ones, which are just so ****ed good, however shoddy their other products are). I think that in part, this is because the chipset is so old - I actually have two keyboards plugged in because my preferred one (a Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) doesn’t even work until an OS loads its USB drivers. In fact, since then, the problem has gotten a bit worse, as the built-in USB ports aren’t providing enough power to make certain items work right. However, the card, though cheap, works fine with my devices.
Also somewhere around the beginning of the year, I changed my video card. I had a heck of a time finding an AGP card. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with it, though there’s something weird about it. Since the GPU is a 6200, the nVidia driver for newer chips should recognize it. However, it doesn’t while the one for legacy cards works just fine. Now, I’ve thought about compositing being a possible factor in the locking, but if I turn off compositing in KDE4 it will still lock up, though it seems to last a little longer. And in Enlightenment, I have compositing on and it doesn’t seem to be much of a factor, although, as I said earlier, Enlightenment will lock up from time to time.
Another thing I did somewhere around the beginning of the year, although I’m fairly certain that I did this after the problem start, was to take out my NIC and begin using the one on the motherboard. That may have been among my attempts to solve the problem, though. But the old card may have been giving me trouble, too. Pardon me, my memory isn’t great.
Now, I’ve thought about the CPU overheating. But when I do my hard reset, the BIOS boot messages give me reports of 115-130 degrees Farenheit. This seems well within range and these are the values I’ve always gotten. And anyway, I figure if that was the problem, the CPU would have fried by now.
Okay, that’s as much as I can think of right now. I hope someone can help. All I really need is a way to test these things without expensive equipment. If I could afford that, I’d just upgrade everything. But I’m kind of in a bind (like everyone is) as well as between jobs (the family business can’t afford to pay me any more) and this system has been enough for my needs anyway. If you can suggest something or figure out what the problem is from what I’ve said, that’d be great.
Thanks.