Hey gang,
I'm running FC6 on an IBM NetVista desktop, 2.4GHz P4, 2GB RAM, onboard i810 graphics. This machine was until recently running perfectly under old RedHat 9. I wiped that out in favor of FC6 a few weeks ago. I run yum so I have all the updates. Everything works nicely for a while, but after a period of time, which can vary from as little as 30 minutes after booting to as long as 6 or so hours, the GUI starts misbehaving. I spend most of my time in various gnome-terminals, and the first symptom I usually notice is that they stop refreshing unless prompted by some other event. For instance, I'll type "ls" at the prompt and hit return, and nothing happens. No output appears, prompt does not return. But then, if I hit another key, or even just move the mouse, the output will appear. This happens with anything I do in the gnome-terminal. Even if I just hit return at the prompt, I don't get another prompt unless I move the mouse or press another key. Also, if I use the bash tab-for-filename completion thing causing a system beep, the beep doesn't just beep-- it goes "beeeeeeeeee...." and never stops. The only way I've been able to shut it up when this happens is "rmmod pcspkr".
Once this starts happening, I also notice that the gnome-clock in the panel stops updating. If I run the 'date' command from the shell, the date is still correct, but the gnome-clock remains frozen at whatever time the problem started occurring. However, if I move the mouse directly over the gnome-clock in the panel, it will then update to the current time. But it then won't update again until I again move the mouse over it.
Then I notice other similar things-- if I launch something in the GUI that causes the cursor to turn into that little animated spinner, the spinner doesn't animate unless the mouse is moving. If the mouse is not moving, the spinner freezes. If I jiggle the mouse, the spinner animates as long as I'm doing it. At this point though, new windows and such usually won't appear anymore if I try to launch them.
Once I'm in this bad state, if I try to CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a console login, the whole display locks up totally. If instead I try to logout or reboot, either from the gnome menu or even by running "reboot" from the command line, nothing happens. I can see the "reboot" command sitting there if I look with ps, but the machine never goes down.
I can always still ping it from another machine, even in the CTRL-ALT-F1 case when the GUI is totally locked up. I have occasionally been able to ssh into it at that point too, but more usually I can't. The ssh seems to connect (asks for pw), but no shell prompt ever appears.
So, what have I already tried? I noticed that I had the problem where I got the 586 kernel, so I replaced that with the 686 kernel-- no difference. There is nothing in /var/log/messages or /var/log/Xorg.0.log when this happens. I initially suspected the screensaver, because it often happened right after waking up from that, so I disabled it, which didn't help (I've also disabled suspend). It now happens at random times. I tried changing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the vesa driver instead of i810, but then X won't even start (I'm running at 1600x1200 which I guess the vesa driver doesn't support). I changed the BIOS setting to give the onboard graphics 8MB instead of the default of 1MB (didn't help). I've googled my brains out, but haven't managed to turn up any other mention of symptoms like these.
Anyone out there have any clue?
Thanks.