Tremulous crashing Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06

[reic]

'lo there, first post, first question.

Recently Tremulous seems to kill my system (Athlon XP 1800, GeForce 4200, 1024 MB RAM, Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06) after approximately 30 minutes in game. The crash brings the system to total halt, leaving the game sound in an annoying scooterish techno - like repeating sequence. Screen freezes with the last picture I've seen in game, no keyboardcommands work,  no x server kill possible, only way to get the machine something done is hammerin' on the reboot button.

Strange thing is that I've been able to play Tremulous without any problem and with great pleasure for the last 3 weeks. The problem has been showing up for the last two days - the only thing I changed on my system was messing around with MySQL, lIRC and MythTV, but I should have undone those changes - and I can't think of a way I ruined anything that has to do with the game by those things.

[EDIT]
Because the system crashes totally, I wasn't able to retrieve any possible error message - playing the game in window mode till crash and then having a look at the terminal showed me no error message either - everything looked fine. If anyone's interested, I got a terminal - output from starting and closing the game regularly - looks normal to me though.
[/EDIT]

I'd be very happy if anyone had got some advice on this one or at least someone had a problem like this so we could discuss the thing here.
Regards, reic

[biocrasher]

I had the same problem but it was totally hardware related.
After taking a close look at my machine I discovered that the graphics card fan was burnt.
So you might want to check for heat problems, too.

Any way if you hit this problem again, don't go for the reboot button. Use the following key sequence, which is much safer.
Alt-sysrq-r
Alt-sysrq-s
Alt-sysrq-e
Alt-sysrq-i
Alt-sysrq-u
Alt-sysrq-b

The mnemonic for it is "Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring"
(I know it's lame but I didn't come up with it    )

P.S. watch out for the sysrq button. it might be grouped with another and require a shift(and if you have an ms keyboard it may need to disable F-lock first)

[tjw]

Choose memtest86 from your grub boot menu and let it run all night.  You'll probably find some memory errors.   Sometimes you can tweak your BIOS memory settings to correct such problems.

[reic]

Thanks guys - I'll check those things! Anyway, my machine has made itself clear that this problem has nothing to do with Tremulous - crashed playing other 3D - applications, too (while a session of neverputt [3d minigolf] - and that is why my roommate claims he has won the match )

[reic]

Awright, actually it wasn't that bad. After you gave me the advice to look for heat problems, I cleaned the old thing up. Tons of dust seem to have slowed down the fan of my graphic card. Now that I've put my PCI cards a slot further away from the AGP slot and I've cleaned the fan it looks like everything's as good as new.

Shame on me to blame Tremulous and poor Dapper  :oops:

Thanks for your help though, I really appreciate it - see you on a server

[Draconishinobi]

I had the same problem but it was totally hardware related.
After taking a close look at my machine I discovered that the graphics card fan was burnt.
So you might want to check for heat problems, too.

Any way if you hit this problem again, don't go for the reboot button. Use the following key sequence, which is much safer.
Alt-sysrq-r
Alt-sysrq-s
Alt-sysrq-e
Alt-sysrq-i
Alt-sysrq-u
Alt-sysrq-b

The mnemonic for it is "Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring"
(I know it's lame but I didn't come up with it    )

P.S. watch out for the sysrq button. it might be grouped with another and require a shift(and if you have an ms keyboard it may need to disable F-lock first)

Usually what I do if a game is not responding is

Ctrl-Alt-F1
login as normal user
ps -U $USER
kill #### (where #### is the process id number of program to be killed)
ps -U $USER (now check to see that it is dead ... if not then do the more dangerous
kill -KILL #### )
exit
Ctrl-Alt-F7 (this returns you to your normal desktop ... you might need to try other F# keys if F7 doesn't work)

This has saved me from many unnecessary reboots (except for the time when my GPU fan got clogged with dust )

[biocrasher]

Usually what I do if a game is not responding is

Ctrl-Alt-F1
login as normal user
ps -U $USER
kill #### (where #### is the process id number of
...

I should have clarified probably that this sequence is a last resort, when all else fails.

I usually do almost the same thing
(kill -s sigabrt $(pidof whatever_program)
and if it doesn't die, the same with  sigkill)

But as he mentioned X wasn't dying, which usually
means that the problem is more than a runaway
process.

By the way the card that was giving me the problem
gave up it's last triangle last night and now I have to
wait for the new one to come until I can play
again.... :evil: