Frozen Firefox Screen

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Frozen Firefox Screen
started by: jaygeedsl

Posted by jaygeedsl on Jan. 06 2008,11:06

Hi All

I'm running dsl-3.3 embedded with VMwareplayer on a WinXP only HD. VMwareplayer memory is set at 128MB with a 500MB virtual HD.

The host set-up is 2.4Ghz Celeron, 1MB RAM, 40GB master HD (as above), 80GB slave HD (Fedora8).

Net access is dial-up via an external 56Kbs V92 serial modem.

When browsing with DSL's Firefox within VMwareplayer I've had several unexpected drops of carrier leaving a frozen Firefox screen.

Recovery requires a VM "power off and exit" then reboot. During reboot the virtual HD is found to be corrupted. This needs manual correction

as "sudo su" by running fcsk, followed by "mount -n -o remount,rw /", then Ctrl_D to complete the boot process.

I doubt this is the usual way out of a simple carrier drop so I'm obviously missing several basic user tricks here.

Any help would be appreciated.

John

Posted by curaga on Jan. 06 2008,12:12

You most probably ran out of ram. There are some tricks to limit Firefox memory usage, do a forum search.
Is there a swap partition on your virtual HD? It could prevent out-of-memory.

To kill X, press ctrl+alt+backspace. I have no idea if this works in vmware though, it doesn't work in qemu.

Posted by jaygeedsl on Jan. 06 2008,21:34

Quote (curaga @ Jan. 06 2008,12:12)

You most probably ran out of ram. There are some tricks to limit Firefox memory usage, do a forum search.
Is there a swap partition on your virtual HD? It could prevent out-of-memory.
To kill X, press ctrl+alt+backspace. I have no idea if this works in vmware though, it doesn't work in qemu.

Didn't think the problem could be RAM-related as the source article crib sheet went into fine detail and the project aim was to be able to "surf the web using a completely disposable lightweight virtual machine".

I also assumed that the DSL Firefox browser was a limited RAM required version.

The virtual HD is set as /dev/hda1 128MB swap partition and the balance of 380 odd MB is /dev/hda2.

I'll try your limit Firefox memory tricks suggestion before changing the VM set-up if necessary.

BTW I did a reflex Ctrl_Alt_Backspace the first time the screen froze and the reboot was messier than "power off and exit".

Posted by jaygeedsl on Jan. 07 2008,12:34

To test the RAM shortage theory I've doubled the VMwareplayer memory allocation via Player>Troubleshoot>MemoryAllocation to 256MB and confined web browsing to using DILLO but I'm still getting the carrier drop and a frozen DSL screen.

The good news is that exiting VMwareplayer via Player>Troubleshoot>Reset instead of >Power Off+Exit gives a hands-free DSL reboot with an automatic fcsk virtual HD clean-up.

I'm going to concentrate on the external serial modem dial-up aspect of the problem. The last time I used something like Microcom was with a 9.6Kbs modem under DOS 5 so I'm not overly optimistic of sorting this out.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Jan. 07 2008,16:09

I've tried DSL 3.x under vmware server and hadn't had noticed this problem... if you can try using it, could you see if you encounter the same problem as under vmware player?

Posted by jaygeedsl on Jan. 08 2008,23:08

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Jan. 07 2008,16:09)

I've tried DSL 3.x under vmware server and hadn't had noticed this problem... if you can try using it, could you see if you encounter the same problem as under vmware player?

I'm posting this with Firefox on The DSL Book live cd using the identical modem set-up that's caused the problem in DSL embedded within VMware player so it looks like the problem is peculiar to the VMware player/WinXP2 interface.

I hope to pursue the question in the VM forum once I've persauded them not to insist on my full personal contact details over a non-sshl link just to register in a user forum.

I haven't used VMware server as it's a bit hefty for a dial-up download but I'd imagine it's adaptable enough not to encounter the same sort of problem.