[CLUE-Tech] KDE/Gnome is crashing for no reason...

[mgushee at havenrock.com]

On 7 Mar 2003 at 1:57, Solid D wrote:

> I can't seem to run anything for more the 20mins
> without a crash.  It seems everytime I run mozilla or
> Konqueror or a few games I have a crash in 20mins or a
> freeze up.  What is this?  A buggy xfree86 with 3d
> support?  

You might want to describe your problem a little more precisely. What 
does a "crash" consist of, exactly?

Also, your subject line mentions both KDE and Gnome. Are you positive 
that the problems occur with both? And if so, does using one or the 
other affect the *frequency* of the problems? Are there particular 
actions or conditions that seem to cause or aggravate the crashes? 
The answers to these questions might help you narrow down the many 
potential causes.

Actually, I've been having a vaguely similar problem myself. On my 
laptop (so it's not the same video card--sorry), the X session will 
freeze in response to certain mouse events--it seems to happen mainly 
when I try to drag-and-drop a window too quickly. By 'freeze', I mean 
that the screen is completely frozen, and the machine won't accept 
any input whatsoever in the X session; Linux per se is still running 
fine, and if the box is on the network I can SSH in an use the shell 
without difficulty, but the X freeze is unrecoverable--the screen is 
unchanged, even if I kill X server. The only cure is to reboot.

This has happened with at least 2 Linux distributions and XFree86 3.x 
and 4.x, so it seems likely that it's more a hardware than a software 
problem. Another interesting thing I've noticed is that Qt 
applications (which, of course, includes KDE) greatly aggravate the 
problem, to the extent that I'm hesitant to use them at all on that 
machine. My hypothesis about that is that Qt is in some way "pushing 
the envelope"--exercising the video system more than other GUI 
toolkits.

Does that sound similar to what you're experiencing?

> A friend of mine said it was because I was using abit
> motherboard with a ATI Rage fury pro (32megs component
> in/out)

Okay, so the problem might be related to a specific video card. Maybe 
you should see what happens if you try a different one. Used video 
cards are cheap, and even if the real problem is a bug in XFree86,
you can probably change your hardware a lot quicker than you can fix 
that bug.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO USA