[gentoo-user] Freeze up during X session

[Harry Putnam]

I'm experiencing a problem where during an X session the machine
inexplicably freezes up... networking along with mouse keyboard etc.
No access is then possible via ssh or any other way other than a hard
reboot. 

I've attempted to debug the problem by first searching the logs.  But
not finding anything I recognize as a clue.

I've  inserted a line like this in /etc/syslog.conf
cat /etc/syslog.conf 
 [...]
 *.*                     -/var/log/debug.log
 [...]

and then created a tiny script called by cron every 5 minutes that
simply pinged an external host and reported the results by way of
piping to `logger', guaranteeing it would appear in the system logs .

Then after a freeze up and reboot, search the logs for the most recent
successful ping and see what happened after that.  (The freeze up freezes
networking too so the ping would then fail).  And Hopefully I'd see
something of note between the last successful ping and the reboot.

But I see absolutely nothing of note.

The freeze does not appear to obey any particular time frame after a
boot, only that sooner or later a freeze up will occur.

Apparently there is nothing happening that merits a log entry. 

Its been going on for a goodly while and I've just been rebooting as
needed ... I haven't been really active on the machine for a while so
it was easy to get along with, but now I need to do more work and so
the problem is a major stumbling block.