DSL frequently lock up.

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: DSL frequently lock up.
started by: davidA

Posted by davidA on Oct. 10 2007,18:02

I have been using DSL for a few years now on my old laptop. Often I will install it to my hard drive or will sometimes run from CD.

The machine is a Panasonic CF-25 with 98 Mb Ram and a 168 MHZ pentium processor.

My machine will boot up just fine but will (usually after an hour or so) entirely lock up. No key stroke combinations will work to bring the O/S down gracefully (when this happens) and I am stuck with hitting the reset button as the only option.

Afterwards I will fsck the filesystem and reboot (until this happens again) I have a good basic knowledge but am not an advanced linux user.

This usually happens when web browsing but sometimes when the machine is left alone and is sitting. If I call up a graphics intensive web page there is more than a 75% chance that it will happen.

Is my machine just too underpowered - I cannot upgrade it further? Or is this possibly caused by something else......

I am connecting to the net using ADSL broadband connection, using a PCMIA network card.

DSL finds and sets up my network connection just fine (on bootup) without any help from me.

I will add that this problem occurs regardless of if I am running from a live CD or from the hard drive.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Many Thanks

David

Posted by roberts on Oct. 10 2007,20:13

Are you using firefox? Check and reduce cache size.

You can also boot with the lowram image, i.e., at the first boot prompt:

boot: lowram

Are you using extensions? Don't use .dsl but try uci

Also you could be experiencing the blank screensaver lockup but that would be if inactive for 10 minutes. Use tset to disable.

Posted by davidA on Oct. 10 2007,20:40

Thank you: yes I am using Firefox. I will check those options out.

Cheers

David

Posted by florian on Oct. 10 2007,21:25

and activate a swap partition if possible (perhaps 200Mb in your case). This helps a lot!

Posted by davidA on Oct. 11 2007,02:55

Thanks florian and roberts. I first tried using a cheat code (I read the wiki) to tell the kernel how much memory I have available and it still locked up.

Afterwards I enabled the `lowram' option in my grub config file, And also reduced my Firefox Cache size (as recommended)

It's been running fine for a few hours now and I have been trying to crash it (just to test)

I will do further tuning if required and will leave it running for a few days to see what happens.

Thank you both very much. I should have posted here earlier as I have been struggling with this for some time.

David

Posted by davidA on Oct. 12 2007,05:15

One last note:

Running in 'lowram' mode made such an improvement that today I reinstalled to the hard drive, so as to be able to have a swap partition.

I gave my main compter to my daughter a few days ago; she needed a powerful machine for work and hers had broken down.

I had expected to have to get something else myself.

My old laptop is working so well now that I doubt I will bother. It's amazing the difference a little fine tuning will make.

Thanks again roberts and florian.

David