[conspire] Re: Distro help

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ryman (rymanle at gmail.com):

> Hi guys, I'm sorry about the unclear question. 

No problem at all.  Welcome to "conspire", CABAL's discussion list.

> Here is my computer spec:
> Pent4 2.G
> GigaByte Motherboard. I'm not sure what model it is.
> 512MB of RAM
> 80G HD on hda1
> 60G HD on hdb1
> Audizy 2zs sound card
> NVIDA 5700 Ultra
> I'm running Ubuntu Hoary only.

Sweet little machine.  Nice.

> Here are the problems:
> 
> 1/ Some times when I downloaded something via Firefox and I saved them
> on desktop but when I check my desktop. They aren't there. They
> disappeared. I can only see them after I restarted my computer.

You're getting closer to what folks from Missouri would want.  ;->
(Remember, I was saying techies are figuratively from Missouri in the
sense that their motto is "Show me.")  Ideally, you want to describe
symptoms by saying exactly what you observed, without trying to
interpret what you saw, in exact chronological order: I did this, the
computer displayed this, I did this, etc.

When you say "saved them on desktop", I figure you mean within the GNOME
system that is the default for Ubuntu Linux users, and which I personally
don't use.  I _believe_ that this "desktop" is a directory (folder)
called "Desktop" (note capital letter) inside your home directory.
You'll want to confirm my recollection on that point, however.

I'm going to show you on my own machine in front of me what I'd like you
to do.  On this machine, I've created a "Desktop" directory and put a
dummy simulated-download file in it, just so it'll look sort of the way
yours does.  My comments are marked with "#" comment characters.

Open a terminal window, e.g., using gnome-terminal.  Then do this sort
of thing:

  rick at kenny:~$ pwd   #stands for "print (to screen) working directory
                      #and basically means "where am I"?
  /home/rick          #Here, the machine tells me I'm in the home
                      #directory of user "rick".
  rick at kenny:~$ cd Desktop   #Go down a level to subdirectory "Desktop".
  rick at kenny:~/Desktop$ pwd   #Where am I?
  /home/rick/Desktop          #Oh, OK, that's where I am.
  rick at kenny:~/Desktop$ ls -al  #List files, all files, long-format style.
  total 8
  drwxr-xr-x  2 rick rick 4096 May 15 15:59 .
  drwxr-xr-x  6 rick rick 4096 May 15 15:59 ..
  -rw-r--r--  1 rick rick 0 May 15 15:59 some-file-I-downloaded.tar.gz
                               #That last item's the simulated download file.
                               #At this point, _please_ copy-and-paste
                               #the entire command session into an e-mail
                               #or other place for safe-keeping.  The
                               #whole point of this is to collect 
                               #information that you can "show us".
  rick at kenny:~/Desktop$ exit   #At that point, your terminal window will close.


The point of the above is that you'll be able to see objectively what's 
in your "Desktop" directory (folder) -- and be able to make us see, too
-- using simple, predictable tools that we all know and have faith in.
Later, if you're very sure that your files "disappeared", you can 
do the same commands and, again, show us.

You may find that the files are actually still where Firefox put them; 
I really can't say for sure.

(In the above, the "rick at kenny:~$" stuff is just the command prompt:
You won't type that bit!  And your will look somewhat different,
reflecting your username not being "rick", and your machine's name not
being "kenny".  The "~" symbol is shortcut for "home directory of the
current user", and "$" is the default prompt prefix for any non-root 
user, when using the bash shell -- which you'll also be using.)



> 2/ Firefox keeps crashing for no reason. 

Here, you're pretty far from Missouri.  It gives us almost nothing to
work with.  But we can fix that.

You're almost certainly using the GNOME menu launcher to start Firefox.
That's very convenient, but has the advantage that error message output, 
if any, gets suppressed.  We can fix that by starting Firefox from a
terminal window.  So (with Firefox shut down), open gnome-terminal (or some
other form of terminal window) again.  Then do this:

   rick at kenny:~$ mozilla-firefox &

Firefox will now open up.  The "mozilla-firefox" is the name of the
actual executable, and "&" means "start this as a forked-off process so
that I get my command prompt back".

Why should you do this?  Because, if/when Firefox subsequently takes a
tumble in some way, you will almost certainly get some diagnostic error
output echoed to the open terminal window in which you launched the
Firefox process.  (Don't close that terminal window!)  You can then see 
what information is provided, there, and maybe copy-and-paste it back to
this mailing list.

Something else you might want to do, at the same time:  Open a second
terminal window, and type "top" in it (and, of course, the Return key).
That will start a program that lists the condition of all currently
running processes, and updates their status every 1 second.  While that
window is highlighted, type "M" (capital-M, no Return key) to re-sort
the listing of processes in order of memory usage, biggest memory hogs
on top.

Why should you do this?  Because it's not unknown for Web browsers to
have "memory leaks", whereby they start consuming more and more RAM over
time until they quit with (e.g.) a "segmentation fault" error message.
You would be able to see that trend in "top" by watching the row
labelled "firefox-bin" (or similar) start to have its "SHR" column get
bigger and bigger, until it blows up.


I said "far from Missouri" because your wording "for no reason" was an
interpretation, rather than a symptom.  (Also, "crashing" doesn't really
tell us much -- but you didn't know how to report anything more useful,
which is part of what I'm trying to help fix.)  Ideally, you would have
described chronologically what you did, and what the computer did,
leading up to (and through one or two such "crashes".  Otherwise, we
have nothing to work with, and can only sit and guess what you're
talking about.


Again, when you say "keeps crashing", is this when something in
particular is going on, at that time?  Is this while you're visiting
certain particular Web sites, perhaps?  


> 3/ My computer didn't freeze during the day. It freeze when I leave
> the computer overnight to download something. The download was still
> working but I couldn't move my cursor or anything.

Well, you see, this suggests perhaps a problem with software suspend.
In any event, the fact that it happens (so far) only during the night
when you're not at the terminal is very significant.

You may want to see what happens if you boot while passing the booting
kernel the "acpi=off" parameter.  I believe you'll be using GRUB as your
bootloader in Ubuntu, so what you do is wait until you see the GRUB
listing of bootable kernel images, move the lightbar down to the line
with the name of the kernel file (usually the second line), then hit "e"
for edit.  Then, you go to the end of the line and type "acpi=off", then
press Return.  Then "b" to boot the modified kernel-image line.

Here's someone else explaining how to do that:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-21403.html

If that turns out to fix the problem, then you can make that change
permanent (for subsequent boots) by modifying the "kernel" line in
text file /boot/grub/menu.lst , exactly the same way.

> I pressed Ctrl + Alt + Backspace and it took me to text mode log in.

What that suggests to me is that the X server process isn't dealing with
software suspend (sleep mode) properly.

> I think something is wrong with my HD because my HD is making weird
> sound. The computer's temperature is at 95 degree.

Well, that could be -- and it might be a completely unrelated problem.

I'm a bit worn out; maybe someone else can tell you about how to use the
smartmontools on Ubuntu, to check on IDE hard drives.  Failing that,
I'll try to get back to that.

> I'm sorry about my bad engish. 

Your English is fine.  Again, welcome.

-- 
Cheers,                 "Heedless of grammar, they all cried 'It's him!'"
Rick Moen                       -- R.H. Barham, _Misadventure at Margate_
rick at linuxmafia.com