[H-GEN] X dies in some situations

Robert Brockway robert at timetraveller.org
Mon Oct 6 09:15:10 EDT 2003


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On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Anthony Irwin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I Have a Debian Stable Computer running blackbox and When running X if I
> don't use it for a period of time the X session will just die to a console.
> I have the computer load to a graphical login and even if that is left for a
> period of time then the X session will just die to a console.

Hi Anthony.  I've had 2 cases similar to this, but so far no solution.
I'll compare notes.  One thing though - when I had X die (as noted below),
the X server would be correctly restarted (since I was using kdm) and I
would not be dumped to a text console.

I've installed dozens of Woody (Debian stable) boxes over the last couple
of years, most of them destined to be workstations.  All of these have
worked perfectly - except for 2.  For some strange reason both of the
boxes that have exhibited the same problem as your box have been the
workstations on my desk at work (go figure) at different workplaces.

The 2 boxes had nothing in common that I sucessfully identified.  One was
a P4-1.6GHz the other was an Athlon-1GHz.  The boxes might have had the
same sort of vid card but I have no idea - I had these boxes in different
locations (in different countries) at different times so comparison is
impossible.

One thing is for sure, both boxes had low end vid cards.  I don't take
much of an interest in vid cards as all I need is something that'll do a
decent job of displaying a bunch of xterms (and play the occassional game
of Crossfire or Freeciv after work, and any card will do that today :)

> I have a 64MB GeForce 4 card configured as vesa for some reason nv doesn't

I'm certain neither one had one of these.

> work in stable for me only on unstable will nv work.

I dist-upgraded one of the boxes to Testing and the problem just went
away.

> I don't really know what I should do to find out whats causing this problem.

I RTFMed extensively on this and found a few vague mentions of similar
problems but no solutions.

The problem did seem related to reports of something losing connectivity
to the X server iirc.  Whether this is a symptom or the cause I can't say.

My problems would occur randomly but were more likely when the console
(but not necessarily the box) was idle.  It might happen several times per
day or it might not occur for a week or more.  There was no pattern I
could detect (except for a low correction to idleness).  No, no idle
daemons were running.  One of the first things I checked.

It would usually happen when I was away from the box (due to the
correlation with the console being idle [1]).  More rarely the problem
would occur when I was active.  It once happened while I was typing an
email :)

[1] Infact I didn't actually see it happen for the first few weeks and for
a while I was wondering if someone was coming up & logging me out when I
was away from the box since I could find no technical reason it was
occuring.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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