Re: worth upgrading/ installing?

I recently got he following message in var/log/messages. Any ideas?
My system didn't froze though...

Mar 25 19:14:34 AMD64 gconfd (root-2721): Exiting
Mar 25 19:20:03 AMD64 ntpd[1733]: time reset -1.014278 s
Mar 25 19:20:03 AMD64 ntpd[1733]: kernel time sync enabled 0001
Mar 25 19:24:21 AMD64 ntpd[1733]: synchronized to LOCAL(0), stratum 10
Mar 25 19:26:28 AMD64 ntpd[1733]: synchronized to 194.117.9.136, stratum 2

Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel:  printing eip:
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: c01439af
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: *pde = 00000000
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: Oops: 0000 [#1]

Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: CPU:    0
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: EIP:    0060:[<c01439af>]    Not tainted VLI
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: EFLAGS: 00010282   (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 #1)
Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: EIP is at __handle_mm_fault+0x256/0x7c3

Mar 25 20:15:04 AMD64 kernel: ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss: 0068

Mar 25 20:15:05 AMD64 kernel: Call Trace:

Mar 25 20:15:05 AMD64 kernel: Continuing in 120 seconds.
Continuing in 119 seconds.
 ..........................
Continuing in 2 seconds.
Continuing in 1 seconds.

Mar 25 20:17:56 AMD64 ntpd[1733]: synchronized to LOCAL(0), stratum 10

Mar 25 20:19:56 AMD64 gconfd (root-17609): Exiting

Cc: "yahoo-petasis" <petasisg@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 8:01 PM
Subject: Re: worth upgrading/ installing?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Craig White" <craigwhite@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx>; "Georgios Petasis" <petasisg@xxxxxxxx>

Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: worth upgrading/ installing?

On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 18:50 +0200, Georgios Petasis wrote:

My personal experience is:

1) I upgraded my working FC4 to FC5 from the DVD. It took
a very long time. The resulting system didn't work.
(Random freezes in X, various random crashes, even in yum!).

----
while this might work for some, it should work, it may not work and it
likely is affected by things that are installed that didn't come from
fedora core

As I have red some posts around about the nvidia drivers, Ithought
that this may be the problem. This is why I proceeded on a
new installtion.

----

2) I formated the partition, and installed FC5 from scratch.
The result is again a non-working system. Crashes do not
happen any more, but the system randomly locks under X.
If you don't want a desktop, you are fine :-)

----
It's not as if you have given us anything to go on except for a
reference to using GUI login as root which is not recommended.

Well, I didn't suggest to run your desktop as root  for every-day use:-)
But for finding problems, I think its a good idea to not having to
type the root password after some time to run the various configuration
tools.

There are logs you can check for clues...

/var/log/messages
dmesg
/var/log/Xorg.0.log

The sad think is that I have looked all of these, and I didn't found anything

wrong in there...

but if you want to generalize on your experiences, go right ahead.

On the contrary, information about failures is much more important
than success ones. I didn't generalised anything, I just reported my
own experience. I am a redhat/fedora user since redhat 4 and in general

I had never faced any problems so far, except in two releases: the 64-bit of

fedora core 2, and the 32-bit of fedora core 5 (x86).

----

And all these, on a (previously) working FC4 system.
No, I thnk it was foolish to upgrade. I suggest you to
wait untill all these issues are solved.

----
obviously most people are not having the same issues so it would be
likely that it has something to do with your hardware or possibly
something you are doing in configuration that is causing issues.

I am still trying to see what is happening. While the hardware problem
is always open, the system is fairly new and has a few working hours
(as it is my back-up machine). The mainboard is a gigabyte GA-K8NNXP
with nForce3 150 chipset, with 2x512MB kingston value ram (which
has been tested with memtest86 many times). The disk is a plain
120GB ATA WD one and the graphics card is an old MSI with nvidia
Geforce 2 MX-200 with 32 MB ram. Finally, a 500 W power supply from
Antec. The machine was running just fine untill the FC5 install.

Now, from my ignorant testings, I think that the locks relate to using
KDE as the desktop (which I prefer). The locks do not seem to happen
when using gnome. Also, the locks *also* happen when I use KDE
inside a VNC server, so I am not so sure that the problem relates to the
graphics card (Xvnc is not related to any graphic card, isn't it?).
It wasn't SELinux as I had initially thought... Are there any KDE
FC5 users? Do they have similar problems? I tried to run KDE
with my FC4 config files & with a new user (without config files) and
I got a lock in both cases. And with lock I mean a complete freeze
of the machine: it does not respond to network, mouse or keyboard.
Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing. Even caps lock does nothing. I have to reset
the machine when I reach there. And there is no mention of this in any
of the logs...

Regarding configuration, I have't changed much the default configuration.
Host name, IP addresses, screen resolution...

Waiting for the initial issues to be resolved is never a bad idea
though.
----

Also, it would be good if anybody can suggest me on how
to get help on this, as I don't have a worning linux box any more.
Where should I look? How to find out why my kernel locks?

----
I would start with the above logs

I cannot find anything in the logs :-( I can place them on a web server if

anybody wants to see them, but it may be a waste of time :-)