Its the strangest thing, as it just started recently. I’m honestly not sure if it freezes or my touchpad somehow gets disabled. I’m wondering that because most of the time it happens, my dell xps laptop isn’t under any sort of heavy load. Its strange. Idk know where to start or what commands would help you guys help me?
I’ve spent hours before trying to make sense of logs lol but I just don’t quite understand the info. Its gotta be some sort of conflicting software or something. I’m always trying new things, so I take full blame for this issue most likely lol. Any help is appreciated, thanks.
So you can’t switch to TTY with ctrl + alt + f1 (or f2, f3, f4) ?
You could try booting from live usb and check previous dmesg logs (/var/log/dmesg.0 or something, I think)
You could try to narrow the issue by trying to plug in other keyboard or mouse and check if that works.
If not, then probably not a touchpad/keyboard driver issue.
Are the crashes random? Could it be the system crashes when it’s going to sleep/wake up after the system is idle?
I’ll try to think something else when my hangover passes… :D
Uhmm for the most part its random. It was much less frequent the other day but not it’s happening more and more. And yup, tried all the CTL alt f1-all of them lol like I’m aware logs will probably give the best insight but I don’t know much about which log and what it all means plus they’re long as fuck. Maybe I should look into log analyzers?
The dmesg logs show boot logs also from previous boots. It has timestamps. After a system freeze, try to reboot and issue sudo dmesg -T and look for the timestamp near the time of crash, is there anything suspicious?
Ahh so dmesg pretty much only collects info regarding kernel crashes or whatever? Do they usually retain stuff from the prior day or two? I haven’t used my laptop much today, so no new crashes
Yes dmesg prints out kernel messages and it resets every boot. So any driver crashes etc should be there. https://superuser.com/questions/565927/differences-in-var-log-syslog-dmesg-messages-log-files
Just throwing another suggestion to look for, maybe check your RAM usage? When I was first trying Linux i was using a persistent live iso, and it would randomly lock up like you describe. Just about the only functionality I had was to REISUB lol. It turned out my OOM services weren’t closing programs until it was too late … or maybe it was trying to put memory into swap space that didn’t exist. Who knows. Try opening firefox a bunch of times and maybe see what happens
This type of thing shouldn’t happen with a normal setup though.
I hope you can figure it out :)
Thanks a lot. I have a few assumptions just based off what little I could interpret from the logs… When I check htop for CPU and ram usage, nothing really stands out as abnormal. Of course whichever browser I’m using is always the most ram hungry program. Now if I just did a reinstall of Debian 12, should that hypothetically fix the issue if it is an OS problem (which I believe it may be)?