Hi, first of all I am new here, so sorry if this should be posted somewhere else.
I recently acquired a Librem 15. Everything works fine except for a crash I am facing regularly (once a day or two, sometimes it happens more than once on the same day).
What happens is that the system simply freezes, the cursor disappears and the keyboard stops working.
I could not relate this issue to any particular software I am using. It happened when I was with text editors, IDEs and Tilix opened, as well as when I just had Brave or Firefox opened.
I am not sure what other information could be helpful, but any help on troubleshooting this would be very much appreciated
If your system is new (ie within warranty), I would definitely reach back to tech support with Purism. But, assuming that you don’t have any hardware issues, it may be that something did not install correctly with the OS or one of the packages. you could uninstall the applications in question, purge any cache files, etc. and then re-install.
When you have it rebooted and up and running again after a crash, you can use the journalctl command to show log info, e.g. like this:
sudo journalctl --since today
or maybe
sudo journalctl --since yesterday
if the lastest crash was yesterday.
That command will show many lines of log entries, each line starting with the time, so you can look at the times to figure out which log entries correspond to the last things that happened when the crash/freeze happened, before the next boot started (look for a line saying “-- Reboot --” to see the point where it was rebooted). Hopefully, there can be some clues in the log to what went wrong. Chances are, some kind of error message was logged when the crash occurred.
Ah the good old days. After a system crash the first thing we did was take a memory dump, store it to tape and send it to the vendor for analysis.
Also back in the days when the analysts could translate and read memory in Octal.
Although in later years we didn’t bother. Crashes were years apart. Memory size had grown so large the dump and reboot (even memory to disc) could take over an hour and we had hundreds of users that needed to get back online.
Hi everyone, thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately I could not find anything which could indicate a problem on the journalctl. I actually used the following command to try filtering the errors but I could not find anything which is apparently the cause of the crash: sudo journalctl -r -p err.
I actually contacted Purism’s support as well, they keep blaming the crashes on software I installed, which I understand might be the cause, but they didn’t provide any actual reasoning for their claims, which got me quite disappointed to be honest. For example, the crashes happen regardless of the applications I have opened (sometimes it happens when I am browsing internet on Brave, or coding on VSCode, and so on).
Unfortunately the crash happened again even after disabling turbo boost. I will try running PureOS from a USB drive without installing anything else to check if the crash will happen again.
I would recommend checking journalctl without the “-p err” option. There may be other log messages (not classified as “error” messages) that can still provide clues to what is causing the crashes. It may be doing something seemingly harmless and there may be informational log messages about that, and you might find that each time there is a crash, a certain kind of log message is logged just before the crash.
A made up example: let’s say that some program is checking if a printer is available. That is not supposed to be causing a crash, but for some reason it does. Then there could be a log message saying “checking if printer is available” each time the system crashes. It would be possible to see that by looking at journalctl output (it would show such a printer-related message right before each crash), that would show which program/process/service was doing that, giving a way to troubleshoot further. Note that this was only an example, I’m not suggesting your issue has anything to do with printers.
You know, my feeling is you have a faulty hardware. I know Purism has a warranty / return policy. I suggest you take advantage of that while you still can (within the time window). I bought a refurbished 15v4 last year and I do love it. But, I noticed that one or two keys on the number keypad don’t work very well. I’m assuming that is why it got returned. Once, I got the laptop, I had some other issues like the power cord failed and they sent out a replacement power cord under warranty, etc. From what you are saying, my instinct is that there is some faulty hardware. And that is what a warranty is for. Push them to provide a warranty replacement or just return it.
