AKICILJ

[serene]

Help me, geek folks!

More and more frequently, I'm getting these crashes. I'm running Ubuntu (8.04, hardy heron, will upgrade to the next version soon, Gnome 2.22.3). When the thing switches to a blank screen, it then quickly replaces the blank screen with this:

Starting anac(h)ronistic cron anacron [OK]
Starting deferred execution scheduler atd [OK]
Starting periodic command scheduler crond [OK]
Starting web server apached [OK]
apache2: could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for server name [OK]
Checking battery state... [OK]
Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local) [OK]

And then it hangs up there, and the only way for me to make anything happen is to power down the computer and restart.

What's goin' on?

Comments

[necturus.livejournal.com]

I take it this is a server?

Was it formerly working OK? Or is this a new installation?

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

This is my own computer. I used to use it as the house's print server, but that's on someotherguy's computer now.

It was formerly working fine.

[nooks.livejournal.com]

At a guess it looks like X is crashing, probably on startup.

Sounds like it doesn't happen every time? Do you mean that you can run programs for a while and then the crash happens and the system shows you this screen?

The stuff that replaces the blank screen is just standard startup mesages and not the cause of your problem or anything to be concerned about.

Next step would be to log in from the console after a crash and look in /var/log, especially the X server log, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

Being able to reproduce the problem is key; if there's something you can do that will cause a crash every time, then troubleshotting is vastly easier.

[necturus.livejournal.com]

It could be a disk problem.

Can you boot the machine from the install CD?

[myshkintheidiot.livejournal.com]

The X server log is almost certainly /var/log/Xorg.0.log. I think nooks is correct. Can you post the log?

[ptor.livejournal.com]

If X Windows and the Gnome desktop were running, and then you see the start-up messages like you describe, then it sounds like X crashed and dropped you back to a console or virtual tty terminal.

Test to see if you still have use of your keyboard by hitting capslock a couple times. If the capslock status light turns on and off, you do. Then try an Ctrl-Alt-F2 to switch to virtual terminal 2. If that works, you could login and see what the X logs say.

Alternately, if you were running sshd on the system, you could ssh to the system from another system, and see what's going on.

When your computer switches to a blank screen, is that when a screensaver starts? If so, is the configured screensaver an OpenGL 3D one? Try disabling it. For some graphic chipsets, 3D has always seemed to be flaky.

Most monitors can be told to just go into a standby mode instead.

Good luck!