I have a strange thing here. I have a somewhat old PC (K6-2 around 300MHz, 64MB
Ram) running Slackware 10. I use this machine for mp3 playing, so no screen is
attached. I control everything over ssh. The PC has a Soundblaster Live and I'm
using Alsa latest stable version (compiled by myself) and Linux 2.4.27.

For mp3 playback I'm using mjs (mjs.sf.net). Sometimes, when a song is finished
and should start the next one, I hear a beep and my system reboots. My first
step was to disable apm/acpi support in the kernel. This improved somehow the
situation. But even then after some hours of playing, the system reboots.

There are no entries in syslog or messages, so I don't know where to start
looking for the reason of this error. It might be that the mjs application is
buggy, but even if this application crashes, the whole system should not
reboot, because I'm executing mjs as non-root user.

So any ideas how to analyse this problem? Does anybody know another nice shell
mp3 application with a front-end and not just plain mpg321?

Sebastian

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:25:45 +0100, Sebastian Stein wrote:


> For mp3 playback I'm using mjs (mjs.sf.net). Sometimes, when a song is
> finished and should start the next one, I hear a beep and my system
> reboots. My first step was to disable apm/acpi support in the kernel. This
> improved somehow the situation. But even then after some hours of playing,
> the system reboots.
I would start with checking the ram. Sounds like a hardware problem.

On Sunday 14 November 2004 11:25 am in alt.os.linux.slackware Sebastian
Stein wrote:

> But even then after some hours of playing, the system reboots.

Usually caused by overheating.
Make sure that the CPU fan and heatsink are clean and
working properly.
Also do not overclock.

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On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:37:14 +0000, The Real Slim Shady wrote:

> I would start with checking the ram. Sounds like a hardware problem.

Yeah, I'll second that.. it the old pc66/100 type ram? Do some memtests to
start with.

Paul Mc

Sebastian Stein wrote:

> So any ideas how to analyse this problem? Does anybody know another nice
> shell mp3 application with a front-end and not just plain mpg321?
>

I like mp3blaster, works well, easy to install and use:

http://www.stack.nl/~brama/mp3blaster.html

Chris Newport <me@see-my-sig.invalid> wrote:
> Usually caused by overheating.
> Make sure that the CPU fan and heatsink are clean and
> working properly.
> Also do not overclock.

No overheating, overheating is not that easy with such a slow CPU ;-) I have a
fan running, this works for sure. Also I have not overclocked the CPU.

I think it has to do something with alsa, please see my other post.

Sebastian

The Real Slim Shady <Stan@your.house.com> wrote:
> I would start with checking the ram. Sounds like a hardware problem.

I know this is the standard answers to questions like my one, but I'm pretty
sure it is not a hardware problem. I think alsa is buggy, because the reboot
only happens while changing between songs.

Furthermore I found, that after I rebooted the machine, I first have to run:

mpg321 some.mp3

And then mjs to be able to hear anything. Otherwise all programs complain, that
the sound device can not be opened. I also tried mp3blaster in the meantime.
The same crashes, also during song switching. The interesting thing is, that I
can reproduce the reboot with mp3blaster. I boot the machine and run
mp3blaster to play a song. Immediately I play the first song the machine
reboots, if I have not done the mpg321 trick first as described above.

So any ideas what I can do to fix it?

Sebastian

Sebastian Stein wrote:
> The Real Slim Shady <Stan@your.house.com> wrote:
>
>>I would start with checking the ram. Sounds like a hardware problem.
>
>
> I know this is the standard answers to questions like my one, but I'm pretty
> sure it is not a hardware problem. I think alsa is buggy, because the reboot
> only happens while changing between songs.
>
> Furthermore I found, that after I rebooted the machine, I first have to run:
>
> mpg321 some.mp3
>
> And then mjs to be able to hear anything. Otherwise all programs complain, that
> the sound device can not be opened. I also tried mp3blaster in the meantime.
> The same crashes, also during song switching. The interesting thing is, that I
> can reproduce the reboot with mp3blaster. I boot the machine and run
> mp3blaster to play a song. Immediately I play the first song the machine
> reboots, if I have not done the mpg321 trick first as described above.
>
> So any ideas what I can do to fix it?
>
> Sebastian

still could be a hardware problem.

not saying yours is, but here's mine:
Overclocked Athlon 1.33 -> 1.46
running Slackware 9.1
no problems for weeks.
backing up my profile I get a segmentation fault in gzip.
After trying a bunch of stuff thinking it was a disk problem I reclocked
back to stock and no more segfault.

Do you have a second machine? Can you copy the files over and try there?

Ray

ray <nospam@example.com> wrote:
> Do you have a second machine? Can you copy the files over and try there?

I have not overclocked the CPU, the fan is working properly and the machine
only reboots when changing songs. I think if it is a hardware problem, then it
has something to do with the combination of motherboard and soundcard. Also,
the machine ran stable over several years. It is unlikely that no suddently
something is broken.

But I will do some test and we will see.

Sebastian
--
http://www.halle-ist-schoen.de/
Bilddokumentation der schoensten Saalestadt

ray wrote:
> Sebastian Stein wrote:
>
>> The Real Slim Shady <Stan@your.house.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I would start with checking the ram. Sounds like a hardware problem.
>>
>>
>>
>> I know this is the standard answers to questions like my one, but I'm
>> pretty
>> sure it is not a hardware problem. I think alsa is buggy, because the
>> reboot
>> only happens while changing between songs.
>> Furthermore I found, that after I rebooted the machine, I first have
>> to run:
>>
>> mpg321 some.mp3
>>
>> And then mjs to be able to hear anything. Otherwise all programs
>> complain, that
>> the sound device can not be opened. I also tried mp3blaster in the
>> meantime.
>> The same crashes, also during song switching. The interesting thing
>> is, that I
>> can reproduce the reboot with mp3blaster. I boot the machine and run
>> mp3blaster to play a song. Immediately I play the first song the machine
>> reboots, if I have not done the mpg321 trick first as described above.
>>
>> So any ideas what I can do to fix it?
>>
>> Sebastian
>
>
> still could be a hardware problem.
>
> not saying yours is, but here's mine:
> Overclocked Athlon 1.33 -> 1.46
> running Slackware 9.1
> no problems for weeks.
> backing up my profile I get a segmentation fault in gzip.
> After trying a bunch of stuff thinking it was a disk problem I reclocked
> back to stock and no more segfault.
>
> Do you have a second machine? Can you copy the files over and try there?
>
> Ray

What I meant to add (and forgot) was it was totally repeatable.
Reboot. Same.
create gzip file on local disk. Same.
run as root. Same.
run in single user mode. Same.
Everything was pointing to either gzip being corrupted or a bug trying
to compress a 400 meg tar file...

Ray