Bob Tanner <tanner at real-time.com> wrote:
> 
> grip is a cd ripper and lame is a mp3 encoder.
> 
> So, it might be sound, but xmms works fine.

Ripping has nothing to do with sound, though all of those actions you
described earlier involve heavy disk I/O, and possibly high CPU usage as
well.

> I guess I'm looking for more ideas on debugging a system that locks
> hard.

If you have the necessary hardware available, run your console over the
serial port.  You might also get important messages to print out if you're
running framebuffer console and X on the framebuffer.

Side thought..
I wonder if it would be possible for the XFree folks to talk to the kernel
folks to find a way to tell the kernel what it has to do to flip the
display back to text to print out really important errors like Oopses or
Panics.

Anyway, it sounds to me that the source of the problem could be an
overclocked CPU or other subsystem (the IDE or SCSI bus or controller
might be overclocked somehow).  Possibly bad memory.  Maybe a bad sector
or something in the swap partition (try `mkswap -c /dev/hdXY').

Make sure all appropriate BIOSes are up-to-date (motherboard, SCSI host
adapter, maybe even any SCSI devices themselves)

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Any wire cut to length 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   will be too short. 
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                             
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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