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hey, I'm fairly new to Arch (had it ~3 months?), and at the beginning, I loved it. Everything worked without a hitch, and I learned enough during installation that I could fairly quickly fix the things that didn't immediately work (plus, your wiki is awesome).
Over the past month or so, though, Arch keeps freezing on me, which I know isn't supposed to happen with linux. This might be the wrong section, but I'm posting this under the laptop section because I can't think of what else the problem would be.
It's not due to any specific program, as far as I can tell. I *think* that every time it's frozen I've had chromium open, but I think that's mostly because... well, who doesn't have a browser open when their computer is on? It doesn't freeze on page loads or anything either--as far as I can tell it's completely spontaneous.
I'm running a Dell Inspiron E1705, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, ATI X1400 graphics card. When it freezes, the LED lights on my computer for "caps lock" and some other one (I have no idea what it means, but it's shaped like a down-arrow) flash periodically. The mouse(er... touchpad) and keyboard stop working, and whatever sound is playing freezes and keeps repeating the same sound over and over again. Since it's not like a program crash, I can't run my programs from the terminal and see what the output says, so I have no idea how to get further information about the problem.
One other possibly-relevant note is that my power cord has been slowly breaking over time. First the plastic that protects the wires got a slit in it, then it broke altogether, and finally the individual metal wires inside started snapping. Right now it's being held together by duct-tape. My battery has also been long-since dead, so it can't provide power for more than a minute or two. Arch did not start freezing until the power cord started getting damaged, which makes me think that might be the problem, but I don't know enough about computer hardware to know if that's a viable explanation.
Has this sort of thing happened to anyone else? What can be done about it?
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Flashing indicators are probably tells that there is kernel panic. Do you see something strange in logs preceding freezes (check /var/log/)?
hmm.... I think you're right, yes. At least, my kernel.log is filled with lots of normal-looking messsages, but then there's all of a sudden a massive string of binary around the time of the freeze. Obviously I can't read any of it, but amidst the rows and rows of "^@" (in emacs), there are scattered directories from the vista partition of my hard drive.
I'll make a thread about this in the kernel section, though, since it turns out it's prettty off topic here. Thanks for the help!
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