Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1235

Hi. I've had a problem recently with Puppy locking up for no obvious reason, accompanied by both the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights flashing and a whirring sound which usually (i.e. in other distros I've used) means that the CPU is working at 100% capacity.

When this happens, nothing works including the keyboard and the only answer is to turn the machine off and start again (I keep a spare copy of the Puppy save file in case this happens but it's still inconvenient). It doesn't appear to be self-correcting either.

Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening and what I can do about it? I'm using Puppy Dingo but I've seen it happen in Puppy 2.17 as well.

Thanks in advance,

Colonel Panic.

puppyluvr · Posted: Wed 18 Feb 2009, 03:01 Post subject:

Hello,
Its not a Puppy thing, or even a Linux thing...See these...
http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=caps+lock+and+scroll+lock+lights+flashing&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Over 30,000 returns...LOL... thats a big bug.....

Bruce B · Posted: Wed 18 Feb 2009, 03:48 Post subject:

I was about to say it looks like a Colonel Panic. But after Puppyluvr post, it seems better to ask:

Well are you using Opera?

I've seen similiar problems when devices fall out and come back, or don't come back, such as controller issues. I've seen similiar problems on older DMA which can be corrected by turning DMA off in the BIOS setup and on the kernel command line.

If none have other ideas, I guess the ball is back in your court.

Thoughts?

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1235

Thanks, I'll look into it. For the moment I've gone back to an older version of Puppy (2.0) and given it a large swapfile to work with, and it seems to be OK for the moment.

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1235

I'm a bit nervous about mucking about in the BIOS btw, apart from setting the order of priority of various devices at bootup (CD, floppy etc.); I think it'd be easy to set something you don't mean to and have all sorts of problems.

Anyway, so far so good. With a 620 MB swapfile Puppy 2.17 is working well.

Er, it was; it locked up again when I had four windows open. Oh well, a good reason to keep a spare savefile about the place (it only takes up 512 MB).

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1235

I've actually tried to lock it up now, opening every application I can think of until, Conky showed 176 MB of Ram and 63 MB of swap - and still no lockup. On the other hand, I've seen lockups at around 95 MB of Ram and 50 MB of swap. I suspect it's more to do with CPU activity than memory but that's harder to control unless I turn off some useless processes like klogd.