Kitten 1 Jessie 0

[fallenstar]

I'm afraid to inform you folks that Jessie is NOT kitten-proof.

I returned from the kitchen to discover a 9 week old kitten tap dancing on my laptop keys. I suspect he was trying to send out a distress call on facebook, probably including "save me" and "big scary dog", but was thwarted by the need to use the touchpad to click send. Perhaps he then broke Jessie in anger, or in his continued efforts to reach out for feline salvation. Either way, Jessie locked up so badly, I had to take the battery off.

I'd like to add in the big scary dog's defense, that he's been lovely and patient, despite being hissed at, spat at and kitty slapped since the arrival of the evil genius yesterday. Hey, if that's what kitty can accomplish in one day, imagine what he could accomplish tomorrow? He'll be taking down the government by the end of the week.

Watch this space...

[dasein]

Moved to Offtopic.

[reinob]

Either way, Jessie locked up so badly, I had to take the battery off.

So what was visible on screen? have you checked in /var/log for any indication as to why your laptop would "lock up so badly". I mean, kitten or human, this is just typing a bunch of keys which surely any OS can handle without a problem.

So definitely not off-topic :)
But please do check the logs or anything that can assist in explaining what happened.

[keithpeter]

What DE? If Gnome, I've had a few lock ups on other distros recently (e.g Centos 7 pre-release) but never Debian testing, usually associated with scrolling rapidly in Firefox/Iceweasel while pressing keys. Used to get kernel panics with that on an old Netbook, but those gave text dumps to screen.

Did you try SysRq before you took the battery out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

(good name for critter there by the way)

Cheers

[dasein]

If Gnome, I've had a few lock ups on other distros recently (e.g Centos 7 pre-release)

You're a better man than I. I gave up on CentOS 7 after an hour of bitter frustration trying to get it to install.

Did you try SysRq before you took the battery out?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Great suggestion. In Debian, however, full use of the "magic keys" needs a little help. Details here: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 29#p475086

(Aside: From the "Another reason to hate systemd" department, one of the many things that systemd breaks is the "magic" keys.)

[vbrummond]

I tried Centos 7 and liked it but the lack of 32-bit support is killer. I would have to try to cross arch build all of the software, which sounded like hell. I was hoping it would be great but Centos doesn't seem like a reasonable option going forward.

Didn't have any freezes, but Gnome sure is choppy on my hardware. It seems something like 5-15fps even though I can play ioquake games at 100fps.

[keithpeter]

I tried Centos 7 and liked it but the lack of 32-bit support is killer.

http://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/spr ... /7.0/i386/

and for a bit about how JP did it

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/springd ... ALSmhj9QsJ

This is pre-release and a few rough edges.

Springdale Linux and Scientific Linux Fermilab are staying separate from CentOS and doing their own compilations from the source that RedHat are chucking out on the git repository. Scientific Linux CERN are joining in with CentOS I think. Who knows about Oracle!

CentOS will have a 32 bit release 'soon' I gather, but it will be community supported.

Back on topic: I've not had any issues with Stable but did have a couple of freezes like the OP with Sid a few weeks ago. Fedora/Centos 7 pre-release also. It is always when scrolling Firefox/Iceweasel *and* pressing a key.

@Dasein: had not realised that Sys_Rq had been disabled by default under systemd.

[dasein]

@Dasein: had not realised that Sys_Rq had been disabled by default under systemd.

Just to be clear, there's two issues.

1) By default, Debian is configured not to send SIGTERM and SIGKILL signals in response to a magic key combination, regardless of the init system one uses. (That's potentially problematic behavior, but easy enough to fix, per the post I linked to.)

2) My information is a year or two old, but unless things have changed, systemd actually breaks the magic keys. In the world of systemd, the closest one can come to an emergency shutdown/reboot is a forced restart of the X server.

When the problem was first reported, the systemd folks responded with NOTABUG/WONTFIX. And that was the day that I became a card-carrying systemd hater. I don't give a flying floob about why Lennart or anyone else imagines that systemd is superior; being able to do a clean shutdown in a pinch is computer hygiene 101.

[MoaTib]

According to this bug report, the default magic keys configuration of systemd has been removed from Debian:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=725422

[fallenstar]

hey,

any idea of which log to search in? the xorg.0.log has been overwritten.

facebook was on the screen in chrome, with a whole load of interesting characters he'd written in some sort of kitten code. The last ones were around the '#][ area.

[llivv]

any idea of which log to search in? the xorg.0.log has been overwritten.

it depends on what you have installed. ( gotta love that word - depends )
you should go to /var/log and see what you have there.
look at dmesg, syslog, Xorg.1.log if you have them, good stuff for a freeze or crash is usually at the or near the end of the log

I guess you've already tried opening chrome to see if the last page you were on loaded again, if not it's worth a try to see if that is how your chrome preferences are set.

[dotlj]

Prevention is better than cure.
Try setting a password on the screen saver and reduce the time to five minutes or a sensible time to prevent someone worse than a kitten from doing even more damage.

[c00ter]

Prevention is better than cure.
Try setting a password on the screen saver and reduce the time to five minutes or a sensible time to prevent someone worse than a kitten from doing even more damage.

That would work well on a desktop PC, but it's handy to lower the lid most of the way on my home netbook. No need to set a resume password and is fairly cat & parrot-proof in everyday use.

When my wife forgets to do this with her laptop, she sometimes returns to find cat-code. I note the cat has a preference for using Geany...