When the system hangs, the mouse cursor will continue to move, but
it
is very jumpy
and sluggish. But otherwise the system is completely unresponsive
(not just slow).
That sounds like it suddenly ran out of memory.
Try
echo "2" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory
echo "80" >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ration
and see if instead you suddenly see lots of out of memory errors and
applications going away
ctrl+alt sequences. The only thing I can do is to do a hard
power-off
and reboot.
Does anything make /var/log/messages ?
This system is a Dell Optiplex GX270 (4-5 yrs old) with a Pentium 4
3GHz cpu
with hyperthreading enabled, 1 MB ram. I am using LVM and LUKS encryption
on the swap and /home.
1MB or 1GB. 1MB might be a bit slow so I suspect the latter ;)
I wonder if LUKS + swap might be the first suspect
The only hardware change in the system was replacing my old PCI
graphics
card (Matrox Millenium II) with a brand new ATI Stealth X1050 AGP. This was
necessary because the F9 graphical install was unusable; as the old card only
had VGA output and the installer's X11 could not properly auto-detect the LCD
widescreen monitor and was trying to drive it at too high a frequency. I needed
to have DVI output for the F9 graphical install to work; so I had to get a new
video card.
Which video driver are you using ?
Alan