Xorg is killing me

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

Don't know if windows runs on it---never tried it. The machine is pretty much unusable now. It seems unable to read the optical drive reliably.

Then what does this quote referring to:

Any ideas, anybody? Am I condemned back to the world of windoze?

Installing windows on this machine (for the first time). I have used windows on other machines in the past. I inherited this one. I've been trying to convert all my machines to strictly linux (except for one laptop that is a mac).

[dibl]

Re: Xorg is killing me

I'm confused -- how is a different OS expected to overcome a motherboard hardware problem

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

I'm confused -- how is a different OS expected to overcome a motherboard hardware problem

It is not, of course. I think that you are not looking at the history above. It only became apparent that the problem was hardware recently. Originally it looked like a software problem, for some reason.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Xorg is killing me

I didn't suggest that Windows was going to fix the issue but, if I know Dell technical support, they'll do anything to make it seem like you need to do some major expensive upgrade in order to have a functional machine.

And I still think it's fishy that a CPU-intensive Xorg could be blamed on a hardware issue.

Thanks for finally chiming in, dibl :P Anything to add?

[verndog]

Re: Xorg is killing me

I didn't suggest that Windows was going to fix the issue but, if I know Dell technical support, they'll do anything to make it seem like you need to do some major expensive upgrade in order to have a functional machine.

And I still think it's fishy that a CPU-intensive Xorg could be blamed on a hardware issue.

Thanks for finally chiming in, dibl :P Anything to add?

I was thinking around the same thing, and if Windows works then we know for sure that Dell , and not the motherboard has the problem.

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

An update:

I tried installing windows on to the machine. It was very flaky, and failed to restart a few times. It eventually did, so I tried to update it. It was only partially successful, and had some trouble writing to the harddrive. I was suspicious that the problem might be the optical drive, and that it was corrupting some data. So, using unetbootin I created a thumbdrive from which to install linux. (I used Linux Mint with KDE, just to give it a spin). It installed successfully, and so far have not had any issues.

Is it possible that the optical drive corrupted my installations, since they were all done from a dvd?

[dibl]

Re: Xorg is killing me

It was very flaky, and failed to restart a few times.

If you mean it failed to start from the hard drive, after you installed it, then you are still looking at either (a) hard drive, (b) memory, or (c) motherboard hardware problems. You will have to troubleshoot them, one at a time, to figure out which component is the problem.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Xorg is killing me

In other words, install smartmontools and enable SMART for your hard drive. Then run the smartctl test.

Run Memtest for a few hours to test your memory.

If there are errors, at least you know where they're coming from. If it's a bad motherboard, I'm afraid there's nothing easy to do.

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

In other words, install smartmontools and enable SMART for your hard drive. Then run the smartctl test.

Run Memtest for a few hours to test your memory.

If there are errors, at least you know where they're coming from. If it's a bad motherboard, I'm afraid there's nothing easy to do.

I ran memtest for a couple of hours the other day, and there were no errors. I installed kubuntu yesterday and then took your suggestion this morning to install smartmontools.
I ran:

sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda

which returned:
smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 001 001 036 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 10497

This does not look good. However, a hard drive is easier and cheaper to replace than a motherboard.

[verndog]

Re: Xorg is killing me

An update:

...
Is it possible that the optical drive corrupted my installations, since they were all done from a dvd?

I think its very possible. I have an older laptop that I've had trouble with its internal optical dvd drive, so I used a external usb-sata and plugged in one of my optical DVDRW drives. It now works perfectly.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Xorg is killing me

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 001 001 036 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 10497

This does not look good. However, a hard drive is easier and cheaper to replace than a motherboard.

I think we understand your problem now! Just to be sure please run

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda

which will take an hour or so. Afterward,

sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda

will give you the results of that test. If it is still FAILING NOW then you should be getting a new hard drive.

Meanwhile it's still a strange connection to me that Xorg was a symptom of all of this so a new hard drive is NOT AN ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE OF THIS WORKING.
Edit: I didn't mean to sound so bleak. Most likely the hard drive is your big problem especially after the issues you described using Windows. But I think a hard drive, which is pretty cheap, is an easy and potentially good fix.

[verndog]

Re: Xorg is killing me

That's why its a good idea to have a ram only distro , like Puppy, or Parted Magic, for testing.

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 001 001 036 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 10497

This does not look good. However, a hard drive is easier and cheaper to replace than a motherboard.

I think we understand your problem now! Just to be sure please run

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda

which will take an hour or so. Afterward,

sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda

will give you the results of that test. If it is still FAILING NOW then you should be getting a new hard drive.

Meanwhile it's still a strange connection to me that Xorg was a symptom of all of this so a new hard drive is NOT AN ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE OF THIS WORKING.
Edit: I didn't mean to sound so bleak. Most likely the hard drive is your big problem especially after the issues you described using Windows. But I think a hard drive, which is pretty cheap, is an easy and potentially good fix.

Before I saw your post, I had already ordered a new hard drive, since, as you write, the solution is cheap. Besides, a 750GB Western Digital hard drive is about 5 times bigger than what I had, faster and only about $100. It came, I installed it, reinstalled Kubuntu, and everything seems to be working fine now. I have not installed the Nvidia drivers, but there are no issues with Xorg any longer. No flakiness. smartctl shows no issues on any of the testing so far (running -t long at the moment) either. I am running that mostly to see if there was really an issue of the motherboard, which i haven't changed.

[rfakhrai]

Re: Xorg is killing me

Good call on checking smartctl just to be sure. Please keep us posted when you install Nvidia drivers. If all goes well, you can mark this [solved] and we finally solved it!

[jds]

Re: Xorg is killing me

Good call on checking smartctl just to be sure. Please keep us posted when you install Nvidia drivers. If all goes well, you can mark this [solved] and we finally solved it!

Still no joy. The culprit now seems to be zombie kded4 processes. I didn't notice these before, but I might have missed them somehow. Now I get hundreds of these things, and they consume all available CPU. I had another problem that I thought was unrelated, but might not be: battery charging is unpredictable.
There is a bug reported for these zombies, but there seems to be no resolution:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/kdelibs/+bug/515138