OpenSUSE 11.3 often freezes when FireFox is running

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#1

Dear,

More than often, my OpenSUSE 11.3 box completely freezes when surfing the internet with FireFox, forcing me to stop the computer the hard way (pushing the on/off button) and restart it

Does anyone encounter the same issue? Does anyone has a start of a clue to explain me why? Soes anyone could tell me where to start to look for the reason!

Note that the last time the problem occues (i.e. 10min ago) was on this site (no other tab opened).

My configuration

  • SONY Vaio VPCF11S1E: Core i7 720QM, 6GB Ram
  • OpenSUSE 11.3 64bits. I did not install the official NVIDIA driver as it causes the screen fonts to be extremely big
  • OPenBox-session + tint2
  • FireFox has the adobe flash plugin installed

Thanks for any help!

#2

Does it only happen when you are running Firefox ? Are you getting other hard or soft errors ? HAve you installed any new packages and this started to happen ?

#3

ON an other SuSEBOX, I use chrome under LXDE and I don’t remember encountering this problem. But I am not 100% sure!

I will install chrome and see if it is better!

#4

You should also consider renaming the .mozilla folder (temporarily at least) and see how FFox is in a new and extension free environment.

#5

I have experienced the same as geocaching. The whole desktop freezes up at within a few minutes of Firefox on the web like it’s busy doing something, but then everything unfreezes again within a few minutes. The same happens when I use Thunderbird sometimes, but it unfreezes itself within a few minutes. I wish I knew what “gears are grinding” when it freezes.

#6

Run ‘top’ in a terminal and you may find the culprit

#7

The problem is that when it freezes, you can do nothing. The whole system is frozen. Even the ctrl-alt-backspace (to force exiting X) does not respond.

I do not remember such issue in my old days on linux (i came back very recently after several years on MacOSX)

#8

I wonder though
Does this happen with the nvidia driver in place?