[TriLUG] X problems (and happy Easter!)

Kevin Hunter hunteke at earlham.edu
Thu Apr 16 14:38:22 EDT 2009


At 2:08pm -0400 on Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Michael Ham wrote:
> I am still Having this problem of X freezing. I am running Ubuntu 8.10
> under gnome.
> 
> The system was installed fresh, yes. As I said, Xorg is using 99.9% of
> CPU when this happens, and nothing seems to restore it.

Have you tried logging in on a virtual terminal?  (Ctrl+Alt+F1)

> I can still SSH in, but all I can do is just restart if I want to use
> any apps. I imagine other things like mysql and such are still running.

MySQL?  Is this a server or just a development box?  If it's a server,
my recommendation is get rid of X.  Seriously.  I've yet to see a good,
or even decent, justification of a GUI on a *nix based server.

> What can I do here?

If you can SSH in, then can you not kill Xorg?

$ sudo pkill X
$ sudo pkill -9 X    # if it "just won't die"

	or you may prefer the old school method

$ ps waux | grep X11R6 | awk {'print $2'} |    \
xargs sudo kill

As regards sussing the issue (rather than just applying a bandage) try
some other command line mojo.

iostat
vmstat
less or tail /var/log/{messages,syslog} for awhile
check other pertinent log files.

Jon already suggested to see if it's caused by any apps that you're
running.  About a year ago, Pidgin would randomly trigger an X bug in
Hardy.  Dead lock up.  Couldn't even SSH in.  I don't know what it was,
but some operation requested by Pidgin triggered it.  I haven't
encountered that particular bug in awhile, but, the point is, take stock
of what GUI apps you're running when it happens.

Good luck,

Kevin



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