I recently upgrade Redhat 6.1 on my RedHat 5.2 system (yesterday), and the upgrade went nice and smoothly. However, after I logged in and was removing old rpm packages of program that I didn't need anymore the system stoped after about an hour. So I rebooted the machine, let it check the harddisk and let it sit there. Today I continued removing some more packages (after it being up all night) and re-setup my soundcard and reconfigured X, and started downloading some updates for programs with netscape. and then the system hung again after about 2 hours of active use!!! My system is a P133 w/80MB ram a 2.5GB, a 10GB Western Dig HD, a Dlink 530tx 10/100 NIC, a Awe64 w/ 512K on board ram, a Diamond Stealth 3d 2000, a Diamond monster 2 12MB, a STB TV PCI, and an extra parralel port/hercules adapter, and a logitech trackman marble. Right now I am currently running fsck on all of the partitions. And I may recompile the kernel next.
Possibly found the problem. I believe some of my memory went bad.
I would like to add that I am having the exact same problems. However, these problems are close to repeatable on three machines, all pentium classics, none of which had the problem with earlier versions of either RedHat Linux or SuSE Linux. I have not had the same problem in either Pentium II's (2 450 Mhz) nor Pentium III (600 Mhz). Out of the three Pentium classics, one is a laptop (Thinkpad 770, 233Mhz), and two are desktops. At first I suspected Kudzu, but after uninstalling it, I still get the freeze. I have upgraded and recompiled the kernel (to 2.2.14) in at least one of them, and have this to contribute: after the freeze, the kernel appears to continue running (still get sound from xmms, see my ethernet card continue blinking as it continues to download files, etc. etc.). Only X appears frozen (can't do anything with keyboard, mouse, and all motion ceases on screen). All three machines have fresh installs. Only in the third one (laptop) have I upgraded the kernel. My two cents: I strongly suspect thath GTK as a strong plausible cause for this problem at this point. The freeze always occurs when I most heavily move/open/create windows/widgets which use the GTK libraries, and even on the Pentium III, I have noticed (in my own programs) that the GTK drawing functions tend to not be very stable and will freeze as if on an improperly implemented mutex.