Renzatic on 14/11/2010 at 19:13
Okay, so I've got this mom, right? Ever since I bought her a computer, she's been worried about "viruses getting in and stealing her credit cards" and generally being overly paranoid about anything online. In most cases this is a good thing, if not occasionally annoying, considering she's a little more careful than most moms about what she installs. Windows 7 has worked perfectly for her for a year, and still boots up as quick as it did on the day I installed it.
But she still worried about those viruses stealing her credit cards. And eventually I got so sick of hearing about it, I said fuck it, and installed Ubuntu for her. I mac'ed it out, made it easy to use, and she liked it at first. Things seemed good. But it didn't make much of a difference in the end, because now she's worried about getting viruses there despite me saying over and over again that it takes extra effort and a will to do so to get any sort of malware in Linux. It was an annoyance I could put up with, because things worked otherwise, until...
...the day I decided to use her laptop to test out Geovision stuff in Wine. I wanted to see if I could get it to work, realized I couldn't, and moved on with my life. Not so bad, but later that night, mom signed onto the computer and got an "unauthorized user" popup. "PEOPLE ARE IN MY COMPUTER", she said, "WHAT IF THEY'RE GETTING MY CREDIT CARDS"? I said they weren't, it was just a fluke, and to do what I usually do and move on. From there on, it got worse. It's gone from taking 30 seconds to load, to upwards of 10 minutes, I get gnome indicator applet errors when it first lands on the desktop, and everything takes forever to load. A simple uninstall from the terminal took 5 minutes, instead of the usual 10 seconds. Things are SLOOOOWWW.
Usually this wouldn't be a big deal for me, but since I'm not as well versed with Linux as I am with Windows, I can't go through and track down a specific problem. I doubt my goofing about in Wine would've caused this to happen. My best guess would be that an update has brought a bug into the system, causing things to slow down. The resource monitor shows usual activity: 10% CPU activity, 15% memory used. Nothing weird going on there, but something is causing the comp to run slowly.
So...any suggestions?
lost_soul on 14/11/2010 at 21:22
There's plenty of free disk space, right? That could be the problem. I'm usually very careful when it comes to updating a working system. Any updates can break things, it is the nature of the beast. Ordinary users aren't running servers or anything like that, so they shouldn't be too worried about exploits in a non-mainstream platform if they're not installing new updates immediately. You could also check dmesg to see if there are any errors being reported.
Nothing you can do in wine gets started when you boot the machine or log in... unless you explicitly configure this to happen. You can try deleting the user account and re-creating it from the "recovery mode" option.
I personally switched from Ubuntu to Debian because of all their stupid decisions over the past two years. This system isn't as user-friendly though, nore does it intend to be a mainstream desktop.
Renzatic on 14/11/2010 at 22:12
Right, which is the reason I chose Ubuntu for my mom. She's not too tech savvy, but Ubuntu is easy enough for anyone to use. For card games and the internet, it's perfect.
Well, any issues that could arise over a lack of free space shouldn't be a problem. There's over 110 GiB left for the primary, and I have the swap set to its own partition, with more than enough room for it to breathe.
Running dmesg wasn't too informative. I can basically tell what its doing, and it doesn't look like its reporting any substantial errors, but it doesn't look like it has any readable timestamps I can reference to see what's slowing down the boot process. Granted this is only the second time I've run dmesg, so I'm not exactly an old pro here. I could be missing something. I'll look up a bit more about it and see what else I can find.
Though strangely enough, it seems that if the problem has resolved itself. It's still booting a little slower than what it was, but not as ridiculously so. Programs and terminal commands also launch and execute as they should. The only thing I did was run memtest from GRUB to start paring down any potential hardware issues, then booted into Ubuntu as usual. It went from a bad problem to almost fixed on its own. So...
...eh. Linux.
I'd still like to know what caused it, though.
lost_soul on 15/11/2010 at 05:45
In this case, you might also want to check the S.M.A.R.T data from the hard drive. In Debian, I can check this under System Utilities/Disk Utility. It can also be started from a terminal with palimpsest.
Basically, modern hard drives are incredibly complex. They keep track of everything that happens to them over their lifetime, including times spun up/down, number of bad sectors that have been swapped out, right errors, read errors, excessive temperature, total uptime and many other things.
After visiting my mom's this weekend and working on an old P4, I came to the realization that I HATE browser toolbars. Average users always end up with these things installed because they just click next, next, next when installing software. I guess some people like having half the screen full of toolbars. This is the sort of thing that tempts me to install Linux on that old machine and rest comfortably knowing that it will be in the same clean state six months from now. The user didn't even want this Bing toolbar installed. They just have a way of getting installed unless the user watches what they agree to. As a bonus, we could say goodbye to protection sweets and antivirus, getting the most out of that 1 GB of ram in the spare P4.
Zerker on 15/11/2010 at 23:47
I would also run System Monitor (or "top" in a Terminal) to see what may or may not be eating CPU while you launch a program.
Renzatic on 16/11/2010 at 18:24
Okay, I ran a GSMARTcontrol quick scan, and it came back with no errors. I still need to run a full long diagnostic, but so far, everything is looking good.
Running both the System Monitor and TOP in the terminal don't show me anything severely wrong here, (
http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/screenshot.jpg) as you can see for yourself.
So basically, the computer freaked out for a bit, then went back to normal on its own. It's booting as quick as it was, and the only lingering issue is that it seems to take a couple seconds longer to display the desktop after the login screen.
So I dunno. Strange, but at least it's working now. Hopefully it won't happen again.
baeuchlein on 21/11/2010 at 16:52
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Running dmesg wasn't too informative. I can basically tell what its doing, and it doesn't look like its reporting any substantial errors, but it doesn't look like it has any readable timestamps I can reference to see what's slowing down the boot process.
If you want the bootup messages
with timestamps, read the file
/var/log/messages. You can do this by typing
less /var/log/messages (or, if
less is not installed, by typing
more /var/log/messages) in a text console or xterm window. Usually, there are boot messages from the last months (!) in there, so you might even now be able to check wheter there's any hint about whatever slowed down the boot process in the past.
I do not have any idea what may be causing the problems you experienced, though.
Renzatic on 23/11/2010 at 06:29
I think I might've figured it out.
Mom calls me up again today, complaining about how it's doing the exact same thing again. So I ask her what she did before it flaked out, and she tells me she just left it as is, and when she returned a couple hours later, it froze up. Powering down and rebooting took a good 5ish minutes, just like last time.
Now barring any terminology mixups, this is what I think is going on...
See, when I have the computer, I close the lid but keep it running when I'm away. It's never given me a problem. The thing just suspends itself, and prompts me for a password when I get back. What mom does is leaves the screen up if she intends on getting back to it soonish. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the couple of times it's spazzed out on her were the couple of times she didn't return before the OS put itself to sleep.
I've heard from a few sources that Ubuntu has trouble with sleep mode on some computers. I don't have it right in front of me yet, but I'm thinking this is a pretty good guess. Maybe the reason it takes so long to load is because it's trying to rebuild whatever the Linux equivalent is to a hibernation file after the crash. Once it reasserts itself, it begins booting normally again.
It's just a guess at the moment, but I think I'm onto something here. Anyone have anything else to throw in to help me out?
baeuchlein on 24/11/2010 at 12:38
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the couple of times it's spazzed out on her were the couple of times she didn't return before the OS put itself to sleep.
I've heard from a few sources that Ubuntu has trouble with sleep mode on some computers. [...] Maybe the reason it takes so long to load is because it's trying to rebuild whatever the Linux equivalent is to a hibernation file after the crash. Once it reasserts itself, it begins booting normally again.
It's just a guess at the moment, but I think I'm onto something here. Anyone have anything else to throw in to help me out?
If a file is being rebuilt, a constantly lit or flashing hard disk LED would be the result -
if the machine has such an LED. Whether you can reliably get that information out of your mother during a phone call is another question, though.
Another idea would be to look on the screen while the machine crawls through the boot process. Sometimes, Linux prints useful messages on the screen. (And sometimes it doesn't.:rolleyes:)
I do not use Ubuntu (but its "father", Debian), so that's everything I can say at the moment. I do not know where the "controls" are for power management and hibernation in Ubuntu.
Renzatic on 25/11/2010 at 00:23
Quote Posted by Baeuchlein
I do not know where the "controls" are for power management and hibernation in Ubuntu.
They're buried in screensaver options.
So I've got mom's laptop downstairs. I've checked the settings, and the only thing that's set to go to sleep after a certain amount of time is the display. Now I've seen the display turn itself off without any problems afterwards, so that pretty much nixes that idea.
Opening up /var/log/messages didn't net me much info either. It looks like every process in the boot order is tagged the same timestamp at the exact same moment. It seems now that if I want to see what is hanging, I'll have to follow your suggestion and watch the terminal during the boot process.
But first, I'm gonna leave the computer sitting around for a couple of hours and see what it does when I try to restart. Pretty much try and emulate what my mom did and see if I can replicate it.
If that doesn't work, I'll blame it all on my dad. I know for a fact that whenever something doesn't work quite right while he's playing around on the internet (like Chrome comes up in a window instead of maximized), he'll start clicking all over the screen, and hitting random buttons on the keyboard until he gives up and calls me.
And when he does that, he usually messes something up, which freaks mom out and she calls me, and oh god I never should've bought them a computer, and what the hell was I thinking?
