Hey, thanks for your responses.
@Gan Lu: ATI canceled support for the proprietary driver for X1400.
Using the vesa driver won't work because gnome shell requires hardware
acceleration.
@Simon: Actually I will try killing gnome-shell next time. I always
killed gnome-session or the xserver. or simply stopped gdm. We seem to
have different problem though. I use CTRL+ALT+{UP,DOWN} quite a lot and
it never hung up when switching between workspaces.
@Roman: Doing vmstat 2 > vmstat.log & now. Actually I don't know what to
do with the information after a crash but it will provide more insight.
If anybody else experiences similar problems, please comment.
On 03.11.2011 12:38, Roman V.Leon. wrote:
>
>> Dear arch users and developers,
>>
>> I have posted this issue also in the archlinux forum [1]. I didn't get
>> much feedback there. So I'm hoping some people here might have an idea
>> of how to resolve the problem.
>>
>> Problem:
>> gnome shell freezes from time to time (actually daily).
>>
>> Freezing:
>> "Freezing" means, the screen becomes unresponsive but everything seems
>> to continue working (sound and videos continue playing; even the mouse
>> pointer can still be moved). Most of the time I'm able to switch to a
>> virtual console although sometimes it takes 10-20 seconds after
>> CTRL+ALT+F1 to show up. Then, however, everything is running smoothly.
>> It's not possible to restart X since it will freeze again at the gdm
>> login screen, or even without using gdm when loading the desktop.
>>
>> What triggers the problem:
>> Usually it happens while scrolling on websites or pdfs. I feel like it
>> happens more often if there are large images.
>>
>> Hardware:
>> IBM T60
>> ATI X1400
>>
>> I think it's an issue with the open source radeon drivers. However, this
>> problem doesn't occur using other desktop environments. I tried to look
>> into some log files but I couldn't find noticeable error messages.
>>
>> Looking forward to your suggestions,
>> Max
>>
>>
>> [1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=129481
>>
>
> Hi Max. Try to use system diagnostics tools like `vmstat 2`(2 is a
> timeout) for example, probably you will find the key to resolve you
> problem. By the way did you fill /etc/hosts with your PC's hostname ?
>
