I am running Linux 3.4.11-2.16-desktop x86_64, openSUSE 12.2 (x86_64), KDE: 4.8.5 (4.8.5) “release 2” on a desktop rig. Very intermittently and unpredictably, the screen will go black. Sometimes it freezes the image, or cease sending signals to the monitor, but these last two are more rare. In all cases the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive, eg cant’ even toggle “NUM LOCK” on/off.
I have not found the cause, and think it may involve the GPU since it has been running hotter and hotter over the past couple months. Although when I run diagnostics through windows 7 dual boot no errors are found, either with ATI’s software or OCCT. Sometime the problem will occur twice in a day or twice per month. Have only had a couple of crashes on windows in same time frame, but openSUSE is my primary OS.
The last couple times have occurred while streaming either audio or video (with sound) via firefox, but this is not always the case. I have disabled all desktop effects to no avail. I would greatly appreciate help in either diagnosing the problem or ruling out the OS, suggesting hardware malfunction. I have read a couple of similar posts w/ these symptoms, but the issue does not appear to be the same.
I should be running the “RADEON” driver, which was doing better than “fglrx” before the lock ups started.
The last freeze occurred around Feb 6 10:33 on the system clock, so I’ve only included around that time in the var/log/messages
PS: The CPU may be overclocked ~16%, but it has not failed a single stability test in years. The GPU is tuned using ATI software recommendations, with fan set to run at 100% all the time.
If you are running flash in Fx then you may try and disable hardware acceleration in flash by right clicking on the flash player in the site and navigating to settings.
Also try disabling hardware acceleration in Fx.
I thought I replied earlier, but my terrible internet must have not sent it through. Thank you for the suggestion, vazhavandan. I did immediately remove hardware acceleration as mentioned, but just had another crash tonight. It’s been a couple weeks since the last one, which is decent, but I’ve had longer stable periods with Tumbleweed and btrfs. So I believe the problem lives on. I switched back to openSUSE stable and ext4 for STABILITY and performance.
This time the crash occured with spideroak and thunderbird open in the background. I was actively using firefox, with email, streaming music (grooveshark), amazon, and a grammar website open–four (4) tabs running, including audio streaming.
I would love a diagnosis before 12.3 comes out, unless that magically fixes everything. . .
If you want a tool for clear cahce then install “bleachbit”. Alawys use bleachbit when Fx is closed. Also backup your profile data every now and then.
You may use sync to keep a copy of your bookmarks online so that you can clean your profile whenever needed.
I cleared the cache manually, only 4.5mb. Does “bleachbit” provide anything necessary that I can’t just do through firefox? Also is there anyway to confirm that it’s firefox causing the problem, and not hardware? Perhaps a log file tucked away somewhere?
Another crash the other night. Was running Thunderbird, Spideroak, VLC & Firefox–text and images on a half-dozen tabs, no flash or streaming AV. Can’t say for sure that Firefox has always been running, but it has been during the last handful of crashes, so I’m beginning to concur that it may be the culprit. Granted my internet connection is not stellar, but I’ve noticed some odd behavior that I don’t see on other boxes using my connection point, including the Win 7 dual boot I have. Things such as not wanting to load pages, taking several attempts to do so; taking a random amount of time to load pages (more dramatic than standard deviation). . .
Before crash I manually cleaned Firefox, will now download “bleachbit” w/ zypper & see if the settings shown in above post help.
Cleaned Firefox cache, cookies, DOM, session restore and site preferences. The next time Firefox opened and I attempted a search, the system froze, got a green-verticle-stripe test pattern for a few seconds and then no more signal output. This is weird, I haven’t had problems with firefox before. I’ll look into their site, but is there anything else I can do?
So I’ve done a fresh install of 12.3 (including reformatting, still ext4). Still, with default options, the system still locks up and I am at a loss. I just physically cleaned the dust out of the box rather well, and nothing seems to be broken or damaged. Nor was there excessive dust, although more than I would like in the CPU cooler, admittedly. Next I’ll try to reset all BIOS settings to default to rule those out, too. I went through the help section from mozilla for firefox, but to no avail.
Thinking it’s flash player in firefox, but still not able to confirm it. Does anyone know of an alternative?? Or how I can confirm this definitively? Should I start a new thread in a different forum?
I found the above thread(s), too, and made sure my username was added to group “video” per the instructions above. (Reminder: I have ATI, not Nvidia. But I tried it anyways.)
No Joy.
Also playing around add-ons, esp. ones such as ad and pop-up blockers. But the crashes still happened w/ the default browser settings after install of 12.3–I disabled ALL add-ons, and had not yet reinstalled my profile. Still crashes. Now with some add-ons disabled, it seems to crash less. But it still crashes randomly. I have had a few since my last post. The last one occurred on a single open tab with only text! As far as I can tell, no multimedia, no flash, no graphics; just text on a solid-color background. I mean, WTF!?
I’ll keep tweaking, but I wish I had a decent stress test for consistency. I’m not a linux wizard, nor can I predict when the next crash will come. So my apologies for the gaps in posting. Also hope this doesn’t trash my hardware. . .
I have the same configuration and the same problem, it seems to always happen with Firefox as well. I would add though that this has only happened after my most recent reinstall of SUSE 12.2.
The GPU is tuned using ATI software recommendations, with fan set to run at 100% all the time.
